Site Reliability Engineer

About the Team

The Scaling team designs, builds, and operates critical infrastructure that enables research at OpenAI.

Our mission is simple: accelerate the progress of research towards AGI. We do this by building core systems that researchers rely on - ranging from low-level infrastructure components to research-facing custom applications. These systems must scale with the increasing complexity and size of our workloads, while remaining reliable and easy to use.

About the Role

We're looking for an experienced Site Reliability Engineer to own production-critical infrastructure end to end.

This role is centered on data-heavy, low-latency workloads, with emphasis on operating large-scale ClickHouse clusters, high-throughput Kafka pipelines, and reliable integrations with Snowflake. You'll turn ambiguous operational problems into clear plans, ship pragmatic solutions quickly, and improve them through production feedback and iteration.

We are specifically looking for someone who can independently define and raise operational standards across teams while remaining deeply hands-on in production systems.

In this role, you will

• Own infrastructure lifecycle management across provisioning, upgrades, scaling, and decommissioning (IaC-first).

• Operate and scale ClickHouse clusters, including sharding, replication, capacity planning, performance tuning, and maintenance.

• Operate Kafka as the ingestion backbone, improving throughput, lag, backpressure handling, and failure recovery.

• Improve end-to-end latency and reliability for data-heavy serving and query workloads.

• Build and maintain strong monitoring and alerting: SLIs/SLOs, dashboards, alert policies, and actionable runbooks.

• Define, implement, and continuously improve incident response standards, on-call practices, and postmortem quality.

• Own backup/restore and disaster recovery strategy, including regular recovery drills.

• Plan and execute safe rollouts across multiple environments (dev/stage/prod), including canary and rollback strategies.

• Partner day to day with software engineers, embedding reliability into design, implementation, and release processes.

• Set the quality bar for operational readiness and runbook standards, and drive adoption across teams.

• Improve CI/CD pipelines and DevEx for faster, safer, and more predictable releases.

• Strengthen security posture across infrastructure and delivery systems (least privilege, secrets management, patching, supply-chain controls).

You might thrive in this role if you have

• A track record of owning production infrastructure for data-heavy, low-latency systems end to end.

• Strong hands-on experience operating ClickHouse, Kafka, and adjacent large-scale data systems.

• Practical experience with Snowflake workflows and cross-system data architecture.

• The ability to independently define operational standards (runbooks, incident process, rollout safety) and make them stick.

• Strong operational experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, and cloud infrastructure.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills; you work effectively across engineering and research teams.

• High personal rigor and organization in high-pressure production environments.

• A deeply hands-on mindset: willing to debug incidents, tune systems, and implement fixes directly.

About OpenAI

OpenAI 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. 

We 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.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background 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.

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