Software Engineer - Data Aquisition (systems)

The role

You will build and operate infrastructure that supports frontier research and critical research-facing systems. The role involves working on systems close to the metal and writing software to improve networking, Kubernetes, scalability, automation, and reliability.

What you will do

• Build and operate reliable infrastructure for research workloads and research-facing services.
• Support and improve systems across data infrastructure, processing, crawl and ingest, caching, search, observability, and clusterwide services.
• Improve cluster bootstrapping, provisioning, automation, and deployment workflows.
• Debug issues across networking, compute, storage, orchestration, and service reliability layers.
• Build software and automation that reduce manual operational work and improve system reliability.
• Partner with researchers, infrastructure engineers, and service owners to translate needs into solutions.
• Help evolve existing infrastructure toward more scalable, maintainable, and standard patterns.
• Take ownership of critical systems and drive work independently from problem definition through execution.

Required qualifications

• Comfortable with Linux, networking, Kubernetes, provisioning, and distributed systems operations.
• Can write software to automate, debug, and improve infrastructure systems.

Nice to have

• Experience with PXE boot, cluster provisioning, bare-metal infrastructure, or large-scale fleet management.
• Experience operating Kubernetes or similar orchestration systems at scale.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, observability, or deployment automation.
• Experience supporting search infrastructure, data platforms, ingest systems, or large-scale research workflows.
• Experience with Git-based workflows and internal developer tooling.
• Prior experience in environments where reliability, scale, and speed all matter.

Before you apply

• Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law.

About the company

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