Strategic Overview
Software Engineer, Developer Productivity at OpenAI is a dev opportunity centered on the specialist responsibilities and outcomes described in the employer's listing.
The published role emphasizes work such as Drive the design, development, and implementation of tools, systems, and processes that accelerate engineering velocity, reduce manual effort, and increase the quality of output. Like all other teams, we are responsible for the reliability of the systems we…
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 Role
The Engineering Acceleration team designs, builds and maintains the foundational systems that engineers use to build ChatGPT and the API. This is a fast-growing team and you will get a chance to own and define the strategy, vision, and plan for how to increase developer productivity.
In this role, you will:
Key Responsibilities & Objectives
- Drive the design, development, and implementation of tools, systems, and processes that accelerate engineering velocity, reduce manual effort, and increase the quality of output.
- Like all other teams, we are responsible for the reliability of the systems we build. This includes an on-call rotation to respond to critical incidents as needed.
- Have experience-driven empathy for the tools, frustrations, and processes that slow engineering teams down and lead to toil or burnout.
Required Qualifications & Candidate Blueprint
- Have 5+ years of experience in engineering, including 3+ years of experience in infrastructure building tooling for developers.
Salary & Benefits
Published compensation: $210K – $490K
Salary Benchmark
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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 Role
The Engineering Acceleration team designs, builds and maintains the foundational systems that engineers use to build ChatGPT and the API. This is a fast-growing team and you will get a chance to own and define the strategy, vision, and plan for how to increase developer productivity.
In this role, you will:
Drive the design, development, and implementation of tools, systems, and processes that accelerate engineering velocity, reduce manual effort, and increase the quality of output.
Use our latest AI tools to re-think how we can be the most productive team in the industry.
Work closely with various teams within OpenAI to understand their workflows, challenges, and needs, and ensure the tools and systems built by the Engineering Acceleration team address these requirements.
Bring new features and research capabilities to the world by partnering with product engineers to lay the necessary technical foundations.
Guide and advise product engineering teams on best practices for ensuring observable, scalable systems.
Like all other teams, we are responsible for the reliability of the systems we build. This includes an on-call rotation to respond to critical incidents as needed.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have 5+ years of experience in engineering, including 3+ years of experience in infrastructure building tooling for developers.
Have experience-driven empathy for the tools, frustrations, and processes that slow engineering teams down and lead to toil or burnout.
Have a voracious and intrinsic desire to learn and fill in missing skills—and an equally strong talent for sharing learnings clearly and concisely with others.
Are comfortable with ambiguity and rapidly changing conditions. You view changes as an opportunity to add structure and order when necessary.
As technical context: at the heart of our infrastructure is a large-scale deployment of GPU nodes running in dozens of Kubernetes clusters across regions. Some core technologies we build with include Terraform, Buildkite, Postgres, Cosmos DB, Kafka, Python, and FastAPI.
This role is exclusively based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employee.
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.
OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy
At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
Editor’s Market Perspective (Our Custom Analysis)
Why This Position Matters
This dev 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 Drive the design, development, and implementation of tools, systems, and processes that accelerate engineering velocity, reduce manual effort, and increase the quality of output. — 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.