Software Engineer, Build Systems / CI

The role

The Engineering Acceleration team builds and operates foundational systems for building, testing, and shipping ChatGPT, the API, and infrastructure. You will evolve Bazel-based build and continuous integration systems to improve developer productivity and reliability.

What you will do

• Own and evolve Bazel-based build and test workflows across a large, polyglot monorepo.
• Design and maintain Starlark rules, macros, toolchains, and integrations.
• Improve CI performance and reliability across Buildkite pipelines.
• Build systems that reduce unnecessary CI work through dependency graph analysis and test selection.
• Improve local development workflows to reproduce CI behavior and debug failures.
• Operate and optimize build infrastructure across Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud resources.
• Instrument build and CI systems with metrics, logs, traces, and dashboards.
• Partner with product, infrastructure, and research engineering teams.
• Use modern AI tools to rethink CI failure analysis and debugging.
• Participate in an on-call rotation for critical developer infrastructure.

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience building infrastructure or tooling for developers.
• Hands-on experience with Bazel, Buck, Pants, Gradle, or similar build systems.
• Experience understanding the tradeoffs of hermetic builds, dependency graphs, caching, sandboxing, and remote execution.
• Experience building or operating CI systems at scale.
• Ability to write production software for internal platforms.
• Ability to debug distributed build and CI failures across source control, dependency management, containers, runners, remote caches, test frameworks, and service infrastructure.

Nice to have

• Excitement to apply AI to developer infrastructure

About the company

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