Software Engineer, Build Systems / CI

Technologies Commonly Used In This Environment Include

• Bazel and Starlark for build and test workflows
• Buildkite for CI orchestration
• Docker and OCI images for build and runtime packaging
• Kubernetes for CI runners and infrastructure orchestration
• Python, Go, TypeScript, Rust, C++, and other languages in a large monorepo
• Terraform for infrastructure as code
• Remote caching, remote execution, artifact storage, and build telemetry systems
• Postgres, Kafka, and internal services used to power engineering platforms

You May Be A Strong Fit If You

• Have 5+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience building infrastructure or tooling for developers.
• Have hands-on experience with Bazel, Buck, Pants, Gradle, or similar build systems, and understand the tradeoffs of hermetic builds, dependency graphs, caching, sandboxing, and remote execution.
• Have built or operated CI systems at scale, especially in environments where build time, queue time, test flakiness, and developer trust materially affect engineering velocity.
• Are comfortable writing production software for internal platforms, not just configuring tools. We expect this role to involve code, design, debugging, operations, and long-term ownership.
• Can debug distributed build and CI failures across source control, dependency management, containers, runners, remote caches, test frameworks, and service infrastructure.
• Care deeply about developer experience and have empathy for the small sources of friction that slow teams down or create operational toil.
• Are pragmatic about platform adoption: you know how to build paved paths that teams want to use because they are faster, clearer, and more reliable.
• Communicate clearly across teams and can turn ambiguous productivity problems into concrete technical plans.
• Are excited to apply AI to developer infrastructure in ways that make engineers faster without weakening quality, reliability, or safety.

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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