Strategic Overview
Engineering Manager, Core Services at OpenAI is a leadership opportunity centered on the specialist responsibilities and outcomes described in the employer's listing.
The published role emphasizes work such as Setting technical direction for platform foundations such as workflow/orchestration capabilities, large-scale file/blob/storage services, and core service foundations. Have built platform-like systems (e.g., orchestration/workflow execution, service…
The role is listed for San Francisco with the working arrangement published with the role, giving candidates the practical context needed to assess fit before applying. Relevant signals in the listing include Applied AI, Applied AI Infrastructure.
Key information at a glance
About This Role
About the Team
The Core Services organization builds and runs the mission-critical online services that product teams rely on in production. We own foundational distributed systems and platform capabilities that enable reliable execution, high-performance services, and large-scale file/data needs across our products. This team is distinct from developer infrastructure and data infrastructure—our focus is production service…
About the Role We’re hiring an Engineering Manager, Core Services to help lead teams responsible for highly reliable, high-scale distributed systems that sit on the critical path for OpenAI products. Your team will own foundational production systems that OpenAI’s product engineering teams build on. You’ll collaborate closely with product and infrastructure partners to ship reliable services quickly, and help scale…
Key Responsibilities & Objectives
- Setting technical direction for platform foundations such as workflow/orchestration capabilities, large-scale file/blob/storage services, and core service foundations.
- Have built platform-like systems (e.g., orchestration/workflow execution, service platforms) and/or large-scale storage/blob/file infrastructure.
- Own problems end-to-end and can move fast in environments with ambiguity and competing priorities.
Salary & Benefits
Published compensation: $293K – $385K
- Take pride in building scalable, reliable systems and improving operational health.
Salary Benchmark
This role’s published compensation is compared with current employer-disclosed salary ranges for the same role at the Manager level in the same currency.
Benchmark uses active employer job postings in our database and excludes this listing. It is not a third-party salary estimate, and currencies are not converted.
Full Job Description
The following is the complete job description supplied by the source. We sanitize unsafe markup and remove external links, but do not shorten or rewrite the employer's source content.
About the Team
The Core Services organization builds and runs the mission-critical online services that product teams rely on in production. We own foundational distributed systems and platform capabilities that enable reliable execution, high-performance services, and large-scale file/data needs across our products. This team is distinct from developer infrastructure and data infrastructure—our focus is production service foundations and core runtime services.
About the Role
We’re hiring an Engineering Manager, Core Services to help lead teams responsible for highly reliable, high-scale distributed systems that sit on the critical path for OpenAI products. Your team will own foundational production systems that OpenAI’s product engineering teams build on. You’ll collaborate closely with product and infrastructure partners to ship reliable services quickly, and help scale systems and teams as OpenAI grows. You’ll partner closely with senior engineering leaders to scale the org, mature operations, and drive major platform initiatives. This role requires strong technical ability.
You’ll be responsible for:
Managing and growing a high-performing team of infrastructure engineers.
Leading teams building and operating large, critical production platforms, including cluster reliability, scaling, and rollout safety.
Building and operating mission-critical distributed systems with strong operational rigor (SLOs, incident response, capacity planning, reliability).
Setting technical direction for platform foundations such as workflow/orchestration capabilities, large-scale file/blob/storage services, and core service foundations.
Partnering with a broad set of stakeholders, including product engineering, adjacent infrastructure teams, and (where relevant) finance/cost partners.
Coaching, mentoring, and developing engineers and emerging leaders.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have significant experience leading teams that run mission-critical infrastructure in production.
Have experience operating mission-critical services or core distributed systems building blocks.
Have built platform-like systems (e.g., orchestration/workflow execution, service platforms) and/or large-scale storage/blob/file infrastructure.
Have experience building systems spanning multiple cloud environments.
Take pride in building scalable, reliable systems and improving operational health.
Own problems end-to-end and can move fast in environments with ambiguity and competing priorities.
Workplace & Location
This role is based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance for new employees.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.
We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
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Editor’s Market Perspective (Our Custom Analysis)
Why This Position Matters
This leadership opening is a useful opportunity for candidates whose experience matches Applied AI, Applied AI Infrastructure. Its strongest career signal is the scope of the work itself — particularly Setting technical direction for platform foundations such as workflow/orchestration capabilities, large-scale file/blob/storage services, and core service foundations. — rather than a generic title alone.
Resume & Application Strategy
For the application, mirror the employer's language where it truthfully matches your background: foreground Applied AI, Applied AI Infrastructure, quantify outcomes from comparable work, and place the most relevant experience near the top of the resume. If the listing specifies tools, platforms, leadership scope, or domain experience, use those exact terms in context instead of presenting an unrelated keyword list.
We organize source-provided information into this independent job-seeker overview. Compensation is shown only when the source provides it; the official listing remains the authority for current requirements and application instructions.