Software Engineer, Infrastructure - Analytics Platform

About the Team

The Platform Analytics team builds the systems OpenAI researchers use to understand the quality and behavior of the models we train including what models are doing, why they behave in a particular way, and how that behavior changes across experiments.

Neptune is a core part of this work. It ingests, stores, queries, and visualizes large volumes of metrics from pretraining, post-training, and reinforcement learning. Hundreds of researchers depend on these systems in their daily work to compare experiments, debug unexpected behavior, and decide what to try next.

Our scope is broader than metrics. We also build platforms that help researchers analyze samples, traces, evaluation results, and other structured or unstructured data through dashboards, APIs, and increasingly agent-driven workflows. These systems need to remain fast, reliable, and understandable as the scale and complexity of research change quickly.

We are not trying to become a consulting team that builds a separate solution for every research project. We work directly with researchers to understand recurring problems, then turn them into reusable infrastructure and platform capabilities that many teams can build on.

You Might Thrive in This Role If You

• Have owned a critical distributed system or research platform end to end and can explain how you took it from an ambiguous problem to reliable production adoption.
• Have experience with high performing programing languages (Rust or C++), including performance profiling, concurrency, async execution, memory behavior, serialization, I/O, networking, and failure analysis.
• Bring deep expertise in at least one relevant area such as distributed databases, storage engines, analytics systems, telemetry, logging, search, ingestion, or query execution.
• Can reason carefully about partitioning, replication, consistency, retries, backpressure, event lineage, duplicate or delayed data, overload, migrations, and failure isolation.
• Have experience with ClickHouse or similar OLAP, columnar, time-series, or high-throughput analytical systems. Direct ClickHouse experience is helpful but not required.
• Bring strong computer science fundamentals and algorithmic reasoning. Competitive-programming experience is welcome but not required.
• Already use coding agents regularly and have opinions about how AI tools change software development, product interfaces, and engineering leverage.
• Enjoy working directly with researchers and other highly technical users: understanding their constraints, debugging ambiguous problems, explaining tradeoffs, and closing the loop after shipping.
• Have the judgment to focus on the largest practical bottleneck rather than expanding every project into a complete platform rewrite.
• Are a strong engineer first. Clear communication and business judgment are non-negotiable, but your credibility comes from building and operating systems that work.

Why This Work Matters

Researchers need reliable ways to understand model quality, behavior, and reasoning across frontier training and evaluation workflows. When analytics are slow, unavailable, or unable to express a new question, research slows with them.

The systems you build will help researchers move from raw metrics, samples, traces, and model outputs to useful understanding. Better latency, reliability, and reusable platform capabilities can compound across hundreds of researchers and many of OpenAI’s most important research efforts.

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.

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