Job Overview
Location
San Francisco
Job Type
Full-time
Category
Backend Engineer
Date Posted
April 11, 2026
Full Job Description
đź“‹ Description
- • The Scaling team at OpenAI designs, builds, and operates critical infrastructure that enables research toward AGI, requiring systems that scale with increasing workload complexity while remaining reliable and easy to use.
- • As a staff-level software engineer, you will own production-critical infrastructure end to end, focusing on backend/systems engineering with emphasis on low-level performance, distributed systems, and hands-on operation of critical services at scale.
- • You will take ambiguous problems, turn them into concrete plans, ship pragmatic solutions quickly, and improve them through production feedback and iteration, working primarily in Rust or C++ for performance-sensitive infrastructure.
- • The role is based in San Francisco with a hybrid work model (3 days in office per week) and includes relocation assistance for new employees.
- • You will partner closely with engineers and researchers to deliver fast, reliable, useful systems while raising the bar through technical judgment, ownership, and follow-through.
🎯 Requirements
- • Proven 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++.
- • Experience designing, building, or operating distributed systems or distributed databases at meaningful scale.
- • Comfort working below typical service abstractions, including concurrency, async execution, memory behavior, serialization, I/O, networking, profiling, and failure analysis.
- • 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.
🏖️ Benefits
- • Hybrid work model with 3 days in the office per week.
- • Relocation assistance for new employees.
- • Opportunity to work on mission-critical infrastructure that accelerates research toward AGI.
- • Exposure to cutting-edge systems at the intersection of AI research and large-scale distributed systems.
- • Collaborative environment with close partnership between engineers and researchers.
- • Commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities.
Skills & Technologies
About OpenAI, Inc.
OpenAI is a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research and deployment company founded in 2015. It develops large-scale AI models such as GPT, DALL-E, and Codex, providing cloud APIs and consumer applications like ChatGPT. Originally established as a non-profit, it later created a capped-profit subsidiary to attract capital while maintaining its mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
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