Software Engineer, Foundations Search

The role

You will build and scale retrieval infrastructure including indexing, serving, and query execution. You will work with researchers and engineers to develop systems that enable models to retrieve and act on information.

What you will do

• Build and scale retrieval infrastructure across indexing, serving, and query execution.
• Develop low-latency, high-throughput systems for real-time model interaction.
• Partner with research to productionize embedding and retrieval techniques.
• Support dense, sparse, and hybrid retrieval pipelines.
• Own system performance, reliability, and observability at scale.
• Collaborate across Pretraining, Inference, and Product teams to integrate retrieval end-to-end.
• Contribute to model - system interfaces for agentic workflows.

Required qualifications

• Experience building and scaling distributed systems.
• Background in search, retrieval, or indexing systems.
• Familiarity with embedding-based or ML-powered systems.
• Experience with performance optimization and production reliability.
• Ability to work across ML and systems boundaries.
• First-principles thinking in ambiguous problem spaces.

About the company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.