Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

The role

This position sits within a team that maintains the core data stack used by OpenAI's product, research, and analytics groups. The engineer will help build, operate, and harden distributed compute, storage, and streaming systems, with a focus on performance and reliability at very large volume.

What you would do

• Design, build, and upkeep distributed compute, orchestration, storage, streaming, and ML infrastructure with attention to scale, reliability, and security
• Grow the platform by large multiples while keeping it dependable and cost-efficient
• Improve internal productivity by providing strong data tooling to other engineers
• Partner with product, research, and analytics groups to deliver the technical base for new features
• Own reliability of owned systems, including rotating on-call for serious incidents
• Carry projects through architecture, implementation, and production operation

What they asked for

• Four or more years in data infrastructure engineering, or four or more years in general infrastructure work with real interest in data
• Experience running at least one of Spark, Kafka, Flink, Airflow, Trino, or Iceberg in production
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tooling
• Track record debugging complex failures in large distributed systems
• Comfort working through ambiguity and fast-moving change
• Ability to explain technical findings clearly and concisely to others

Nice to have

• Interest in applying data infrastructure to AI workloads
• Drive to pick up unfamiliar skills and share what you learn