Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

About the Team

Data Platform at OpenAI owns the foundational data stack powering critical product, research, and analytics workflows. We operate some of the largest Spark compute fleets in production; design, and build data lakes and metadata systems on Iceberg and Delta with a vision toward exabyte-scale architecture; run high throughput streaming platforms on Kafka and Flink; provide orchestration with Airflow; and support ML feature engineering tooling such as Chronon. Our mission is to deliver reliable, secure, and efficient data access at scale and accelerate intelligent, AI assisted data workflows.

Join us to build and operate these core platforms that underpin OpenAI products, research, and analytics.

We’re not just scaling infrastructure – we’re redefining how people interact with data. Our vision includes intelligent interfaces and AI-assisted workflows that make working with data faster, more reliable, and more intuitive.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 4+ years in data infrastructure engineering OR
• Have 4+ years in infrastructure engineering with a strong interest in data
• Take pride in building and operating scalable, reliable, secure systems
• Are comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change
• Have an intrinsic desire to learn and fill in missing skills, and an equally strong talent for sharing learnings clearly and concisely with others

This role is exclusively based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.

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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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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At 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.