OpenAI
Software Engineer - Data Aquisition (systems)
$295K–$536K
San Francisco · Full-time · Posted Jul 27, 2026
About the job
Build and operate reliable infrastructure and software systems that support OpenAI research workloads and research-facing services.
What you'll do
- Improve data infrastructure, processing, crawl and ingest, caching, search, observability, and clusterwide services.
- Develop cluster provisioning, bootstrapping, automation, and deployment workflows; debug issues across infrastructure layers.
- Partner with researchers and infrastructure teams to deliver scalable, maintainable systems and own work from problem definition through execution.
What they ask for
- Strong systems fundamentals and understanding of how infrastructure scales.
- Comfort with Linux, networking, Kubernetes, provisioning, and distributed systems operations.
- Ability to write software to automate, debug, and improve infrastructure.
- Ability to independently drive ambiguous infrastructure work.
Nice to have
- Experience with PXE boot, cluster provisioning, bare-metal infrastructure, or large-scale fleet management.
- Experience with Kubernetes at scale, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, observability, deployment automation, search, data platforms, ingest, or research workflows.
Pay
$295K – $536K USD base salary
Tools
Linux, Kubernetes, PXE boot, CI/CD, Git
AI focus
Supports infrastructure for frontier AI research; no direct AI development work is specified.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative