Software Engineer, Traffic Infrastructure

The role

You will build and operate the networking and traffic infrastructure that connects OpenAI's products and services across clouds and regions. This role involves designing connectivity, developing proxies and gateways, and diagnosing performance bottlenecks.

What you will do

• Design, build, and operate ingress, egress, and service-to-service connectivity across clusters, regions, and clouds.
• Develop proxies, gateways, controllers, and automation for routing, load balancing, failover, and traffic management.
• Build and evolve cloud networking infrastructure, including private connectivity, NAT, and network isolation.
• Diagnose failures and performance bottlenecks across application, proxy, transport, and cloud networking layers.
• Build telemetry and diagnostic tools to explain traffic paths and identify failing components.
• Partner with Security to implement and validate traffic-path protections.
• Improve latency, throughput, availability, and network efficiency.
• Create clear interfaces and safe defaults for service teams.
• Participate in on-call.
• Turn operational lessons into changes that prevent recurring failures.

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building production infrastructure or distributed systems, including substantial work on networking or traffic infrastructure.
• Understand networking fundamentals including IP routing, TCP/UDP, DNS, NAT, TLS, and HTTP/gRPC.
• Hands-on experience building or operating systems such as Envoy, NGINX, Istio, Cilium, or comparable networking infrastructure.
• Write production software in Go, Rust, C++, Python, or a similar language.
• Can investigate unfamiliar failures using evidence and test hypotheses.
• Take ownership of design, implementation, rollout, and ongoing reliability.
• Communicate clearly across teams when a problem crosses ownership boundaries.

Nice to have

• Depth in one or more areas such as cloud networking, Kubernetes networking, proxies and gateways, service meshes, load balancing, or global traffic routing.

About the company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. They push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through their products.