Software Engineer - ChatGPT Infrastructure

About the Team

Our London-based team builds the backend systems that help ChatGPT scale reliably. We work on infrastructure close to the product, partnering with engineering teams to improve the performance, resilience, and operability of critical user-facing systems.

Our work combines backend software engineering with distributed systems and production reliability. We build shared capabilities, improve high-traffic workflows, and make it easier to introduce new product functionality without compromising performance or availability.

About the Role

This role is for software engineers who want to build and evolve backend systems operating at significant scale. You’ll write production code, design shared infrastructure, and solve technical challenges involving performance, distributed systems, and system reliability.

You’ll also own how those systems behave in production: how changes are rolled out, how issues are detected and diagnosed, and how recurring operational problems can be addressed through better software and system design.

This is a strong fit for backend engineers who enjoy complex systems problems and want a direct connection between the infrastructure they build and the experience of ChatGPT users.

In this role, you will:

• Design, build, and maintain backend systems supporting high-traffic ChatGPT experiences.

• Develop shared services, APIs, and infrastructure that help product teams build and launch new capabilities safely.

• Improve the performance, scalability, and efficiency of production systems as usage and product complexity grow.

• Build and improve systems for asynchronous processing and other large-scale backend workloads.

• Lead architectural improvements and infrastructure migrations while maintaining correctness, compatibility, and safe rollout and rollback.

• Strengthen monitoring, alerting, and diagnostics to detect problems early and reduce customer impact.

• Participate in on-call, incident response, and root-cause analysis, and turn operational learnings into lasting engineering improvements.

• Work across product and infrastructure teams to ensure new systems are reliable, secure, and production-ready.

• Build automation and tooling that reduce repetitive operational work and improve engineering effectiveness.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have experience building and operating backend systems at scale.

• Understand distributed systems concepts such as concurrency, consistency, asynchronous processing, and failure handling.

• Enjoy writing production code while taking ownership of how systems behave in real-world conditions.

• Can identify and address bottlenecks affecting latency, throughput, resource usage, or reliability.

• Have experience introducing production changes safely through testing, staged rollouts, monitoring, and rollback plans.

• Are comfortable investigating ambiguous technical problems and collaborating across teams to resolve them.

• Care about clear interfaces, maintainable systems, and practical engineering tradeoffs.

• Take ownership of projects from design and implementation through deployment and ongoing improvement.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant experience building backend or distributed systems.

• Strong proficiency in at least one general-purpose programming language and experience writing reliable, maintainable production code.

• Experience designing, building, or improving services, platforms, or shared infrastructure at scale.

• Familiarity with production reliability practices, including monitoring, incident response, root-cause analysis, and operational readiness.

• Experience diagnosing performance, scalability, or reliability issues in production environments.

• Understanding of distributed systems, data storage, concurrency, asynchronous processing, or networking.

• Familiarity with modern deployment, observability, and cloud infrastructure practices.

• Ability to lead complex technical work and collaborate effectively across product and infrastructure teams.

Experience with cloud infrastructure, containerized environments, or observability tools is useful but not required. We welcome candidates from backend engineering, distributed systems, platform engineering, and reliability backgrounds.

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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