Software Engineer, Compute Foundations

The role

You will build distributed systems that provision, configure, and manage compute throughout its lifecycle. This involves connecting global services and Kubernetes controllers with systems that bring machines online, update them, and recover them.

What you will do

• Design, build, and operate Kubernetes-based controllers and distributed services.
• Define APIs and resource models for lifecycle operations.
• Build provisioning and configuration services for network boot, hardware management, and deployment.
• Develop lifecycle management for discovery, allocation, provisioning, upgrades, maintenance, recovery, and decommissioning.
• Design reliable reconciliation and recovery through concurrent changes and partial failures.
• Improve control-plane throughput, API latency, and infrastructure state speed.
• Build software integrations to bring new sites and GPU hardware generations into the platform.

Required qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals.
• Experience designing, implementing, and owning production distributed systems or infrastructure services.
• Experience developing infrastructure systems that use Kubernetes APIs and reconciliation to manage resources.
• Understanding of how a bare-metal node moves from power-on to a configured, workload-ready system.
• Depth in one or more areas such as PXE, DHCP/DNS, baseboard management controllers (BMCs), firmware, Linux, drivers, images, or configuration management.
• Ability to design reliable APIs and asynchronous workflows.
• Ability to reason about concurrency, consistency, idempotency, and failures across service and provider boundaries.
• Ability to diagnose reliability and performance problems across service, operating-system, and machine boundaries.
• Ability to work effectively across engineering specialties and communicate system behavior and technical tradeoffs clearly.

Nice to have

• Built infrastructure control planes that coordinate operations across multiple sites or regions.
• Worked with GPU or HPC infrastructure, including topology and shared dependencies across machines, racks, or clusters.
• Integrated multiple hardware platforms or infrastructure providers into a common service or resource model.

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.