{"id":70269,"url":"https://alion.io/job/openai-software-engineer-chatgpt-infrastructure-2","title":"Software Engineer, ChatGPT Infrastructure","company":{"id":2,"name":"OpenAI","domain":"openai.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/openai","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":78,"open_postings":196,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.898,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":51,"computed_at":"2026-10-19T05:45:15Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":347000,"max":445000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":445000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"ChatGPT","optional":false},{"name":"Progressive Delivery","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-04-21T01:53:49Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-04-21","last_verified_at":"2026-10-19T23:18:35Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":181,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":181},"description":"About the Team\nChatGPT is a rapidly evolving system: new capabilities ship continuously, product surfaces change quickly, and usage patterns shift week-to-week. Supporting that pace requires infrastructure that can handle real production constraints-high concurrency, unpredictable traffic patterns, complex dependency graphs, and frequent change.\nThe ChatGPT Infrastructure team builds and operates the platforms that enable fast iteration without compromising performance or reliability. We design shared systems, data paths, rollout mechanisms, and reliability guardrails that teams rely on to ship changes to ChatGPT at scale.\nWe focus on high-leverage infrastructure: primitives and “golden paths” that incorporate operational lessons as defaults, so engineers don’t need to rediscover failure modes, latency pitfalls, or integration issues each time they build something new.\nAbout the Role\nWe’re hiring Senior and Staff Engineers to design and build infrastructure systems that underlie ChatGPT and multiply the effectiveness of teams building user experiences.\nThis is not a support-only role. It’s a platform-building role: you’ll define interfaces, develop core abstractions, and create tooling to make safe, fast iteration the norm. Your work will reduce friction, prevent regressions, improve performance, and ensure systems scale gracefully as the product grows.\nWhere You Can Have Impact\nYou might work on one or more of the following areas (without being restricted to any single area):\nPlatform foundations & frameworks: Core libraries, service frameworks, and shared components that standardize system building, integration, and evolution.\n\nScalability & performance primitives: Patterns and infrastructure that reduce tail latency, improve throughput, and keep costs predictable as demand increases.\n\nReliability guardrails: Mechanisms that prevent outages by design-rate limiting, load shedding, dependency isolation, backpressure, safe fallbacks, and robust regression controls.\n\nDeveloper productivity via golden paths: Paved roads for common workflows (data access patterns, service integration, request lifecycle) that are fast, safe, and easy to use.\n\nObservability & debugging systems: Instrumentation, metrics models, and investigative tooling that turn vague symptoms (“it’s slow”) into precise, actionable diagnoses.\n\nSafe change management: Deployment and rollout systems that support rapid iteration with confidence-progressive delivery, automated verification, and fast rollback strategies.\n\nInterface and contract design across boundaries: Clean APIs and stable contracts that reduce coupling and enable independent evolution across a complex ecosystem.\n\nWhat You’ll Do\nBuild and evolve infrastructure platforms used by many engineers and services.\n\nTranslate real-world constraints into clean abstractions: simple APIs, enforceable contracts, safe defaults.\n\nDrive improvements in reliability and performance through principled design, measurement, and iterative hardening.\n\nPartner with engineering and product teams to identify systemic pain points and develop reusable solutions.\n\nOwn outcomes end-to-end: design → implementation → rollout → operational maturity.\n\nQualifications\nMinimum Qualifications\nExperience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production (high throughput, concurrency, and failure handling).\n\nStrong fundamentals in systems design, including caching, consistency, queueing/backpressure, and resilient dependency management.\n\nAbility to reason about performance (latency distributions, tail behavior, bottlenecks) and translate analysis into concrete engineering work.\n\nTrack record of building platforms or shared infrastructure that improves velocity and correctness for other teams.\n\nExcellent communication and collaboration skills-aligning on interfaces, navigating tradeoffs, and driving cross-team execution.\n\nPreferred Qualifications\nExperience designing paved roads / golden paths (frameworks, libraries, self-serve tooling) that shape engineering behavior at scale.\n\nDeep understanding of reliability techniques: graceful degradation, circuit breakers, load shedding, rate limiting, and fault isolation.\n\nExperience building systems for safe iteration: progressive delivery, correctness checks, automated rollout gates, and production validation.\n\nStrong instincts for API and contract design-how to create interfaces that are stable, evolvable, and hard to misuse.\n\nPrior work that demonstrates “force multiplier” impact: enabling many teams via a small set of well-crafted primitives.\n\nAbout OpenAI\nOpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.\nWe are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.\nFor additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.\nBackground checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.\nTo notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.\nWe are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.\nOpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy\nAt OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7110,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Generative Video","Code Intelligence","Foundation Models","AI Research Labs"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-04-21T01:53:49Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 262 · green card filings: 3","filings_12m":262,"filings_prev_12m":114,"green_card_filings_12m":3,"median_offered_wage_usd":272217,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":127}],"liveness":{"score":4,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.139,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":181,"expected_fill_days":51,"reasons":["conf:1","stale_co","velocity","win:tail","crowd:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-19T05:45:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":445000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/openai-software-engineer-chatgpt-infrastructure-2","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/openai-software-engineer-chatgpt-infrastructure-2.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-20T00:28:41Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":495,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-21T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":2},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=2"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fopenai-software-engineer-chatgpt-infrastructure-2"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fopenai-software-engineer-chatgpt-infrastructure-2"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fopenai-software-engineer-chatgpt-infrastructure-2"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/openai-software-engineer-chatgpt-infrastructure-2\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fopenai-software-engineer-chatgpt-infrastructure-2"}]}