About the role

Staff-level Software Engineer at OpenAI focusing on backend infrastructure and systems. Enhancing performance-sensitive infrastructure in Rust or C++ with a hybrid work model.

Responsibilities

Own critical infrastructure across design, implementation, rollout, operation, and iteration.
Build and operate performant backend systems in Rust or C++ that support core research workflows.
Design and improve distributed data and serving systems, including tradeoffs around partitioning, replication, consistency, retries, backpressure, and failure isolation.
Debug real production bottlenecks across latency, throughput, contention, hot spots, and overload behavior.
Operate business-critical services through on-call, incidents, postmortems, observability, rollout safety, and zero-downtime migrations.
Improve reliability of services running on Kubernetes, including resource tuning and failure handling.
Partner closely with engineers and researchers to deliver fast, reliable, useful systems.
Raise the bar through strong technical judgment, ownership, and follow-through.

A track record of owning operationally critical systems end to end and delivering outcomes in ambiguous environments.
Strong hands-on experience building performance-sensitive backend systems in Rust or C++.
Comfort working below typical service abstractions, including concurrency, async execution, memory behavior, serialization, I/O, networking, profiling, and failure analysis.
Experience designing, building, or operating distributed systems or distributed databases at meaningful scale.
Preferably, experience with ClickHouse-like systems or infrastructure for analytics, telemetry, logging, search, ingestion, storage, or query execution.
Hands-on experience operating production-critical systems, including incidents, observability, rollout safety, and recurrence prevention.
Strong judgment in balancing engineering quality, speed, risk, and business impact.
A habit of shipping practical first versions and improving them through production feedback.

Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
401(k) retirement plan with employer match
Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
Mental health and wellness support
Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
Relocation support for eligible employees
Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.