# Software Engineer

**Company:** [OpenAI](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/openai)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** Data Engineering
**Salary:** $255k – $405k/yr
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** Kubernetes, Linux, Networking, Distributed Systems, Automation, Infrastructure As Code, CI/CD, Observability, Python, Debugging
**Posted:** 2026-07-27

> Build and operate reliable, scalable infrastructure and automation for OpenAI's research workloads and data systems (acquisition, processing, ingest, search). Requires strong systems and distributed systems experience, Kubernetes, Linux, networking, and software engineering to improve reliability and reduce operational toil.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Build and operate reliable infrastructure for research workloads and research-facing services.
- Support and improve systems across data infrastructure, processing, crawl and ingest, caching, search, observability, and clusterwide services.
- Improve cluster bootstrapping, provisioning, automation, and deployment workflows.
- Debug issues across networking, compute, storage, orchestration, and service reliability layers.
- Build software and automation that reduce manual operational work and improve system reliability.
- Partner closely with researchers, infrastructure engineers, and service owners to understand system needs and translate them into durable solutions.
- Help evolve existing infrastructure toward more scalable, maintainable, and standard patterns.
- Take ownership of critical systems and drive work independently from problem definition through execution.

## Requirements
- Strong systems fundamentals and understanding of how infrastructure scales in practice.
- Comfortable with Linux, networking, Kubernetes, provisioning, and distributed systems operations.
- Ability to write software to automate, debug, and improve infrastructure systems.
- Strong execution mindset and ability to independently drive ambiguous infrastructure work.
- Enjoy supporting a wide surface area of systems, from research tooling to platform services.
- Pragmatic about when to build custom systems versus using existing, well-supported tools.
- Care about building reliable systems that make researchers faster and reduce operational friction.

## Nice-to-Haves
- Experience with PXE boot, cluster provisioning, bare-metal infrastructure, or large-scale fleet management.
- Experience operating Kubernetes or similar orchestration systems at scale.
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, observability, or deployment automation.
- Experience supporting search infrastructure, data platforms, ingest systems, or large-scale research workflows.
- Experience with Git-based workflows and internal developer tooling.
- Prior experience in environments where reliability, scale, and speed all matter.

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