Strategic Overview
Software Engineer, Hardware Health 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 Define and maintain health signals across GPUs, CPUs, networking, and platform infrastructure. Build and evolve health checks that detect, remediate, and verify failures at scale.
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 Scaling, Frontiers Clusters.
Key information at a glance
About This Role
The Hardware Health and Observability team owns the end-to-end health lifecycle of OpenAI’s global compute fleet.
Our mission is to maximize healthy, usable compute across accelerator vendors, generations, cloud providers, and regions through reliable health signals, automated remediation, and scalable operational tooling.
We build the systems that observe, detect, remediate, and verify hardware issues across GPUs, CPUs, networking, and platform infrastructure, enabling frontier model training and inference workloads to run reliably at hyperscale. We are the last line of defense for the success of OAI’s production and research workloads.
Key Responsibilities & Objectives
- Define and maintain health signals across GPUs, CPUs, networking, and platform infrastructure.
- Build and evolve health checks that detect, remediate, and verify failures at scale.
- Ensure critical health checks execute with minimal latency to maximize workload uptime.
- Investigate hardware failures and system-level issues across large-scale compute environments.
Required Qualifications & Candidate Blueprint
- 7+ years of industry experience in software or infrastructure engineering.
- Experience with low-level hardware systems and Linux tooling (e.g. PCIe, InfiniBand, RoCE, networking, power management, kernel performance tuning, FW/SW debugging).
- Expertise in network operations, observability, or systems telemetry.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with low-level hardware systems and Linux tooling (e.g. PCIe, InfiniBand, RoCE, networking, power management, kernel performance tuning, FW/SW debugging).
- Experience operating or debugging large-scale GPU or accelerator clusters.
- Expertise in network operations, observability, or systems telemetry.
Salary & Benefits
Published compensation: $250K – $445K
- Define and maintain health signals across GPUs, CPUs, networking, and platform infrastructure.
- Build and evolve health checks that detect, remediate, and verify failures at scale.
- Ensure critical health checks execute with minimal latency to maximize workload uptime.
- Partner with workload, reliability, and provider teams to integrate health signals into training and inference systems.
Salary Benchmark
This role’s published compensation is compared with current employer-disclosed salary ranges for the same role 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 Hardware Health and Observability team owns the end-to-end health lifecycle of OpenAI’s global compute fleet.
Our mission is to maximize healthy, usable compute across accelerator vendors, generations, cloud providers, and regions through reliable health signals, automated remediation, and scalable operational tooling.
We build the systems that observe, detect, remediate, and verify hardware issues across GPUs, CPUs, networking, and platform infrastructure, enabling frontier model training and inference workloads to run reliably at hyperscale. We are the last line of defense for the success of OAI’s production and research workloads.
About the Role
On the Hardware Health and Observability team, you’ll build critical infrastructure that keeps OpenAI’s largest compute clusters healthy and operational at scale.
Even small numbers of unhealthy systems can impact large-scale training and inference workloads. This team focuses on minimizing downtime, improving fleet efficiency, and ensuring compute resources remain continuously available to researchers and product teams.
Engineers on this team own problems end-to-end, from defining health signals and debugging failures to building automated remediation systems that operate across millions of GPUs globally.
In this role, you will:
Define and maintain health signals across GPUs, CPUs, networking, and platform infrastructure.
Build and evolve health checks that detect, remediate, and verify failures at scale.
Ensure critical health checks execute with minimal latency to maximize workload uptime.
Investigate hardware failures and system-level issues across large-scale compute environments.
Own node lifecycle workflows including drain, quarantine, repair, RMA, and return-to-service processes.
Build automation and tooling that enables global cluster management with minimal manual intervention.
Partner with workload, reliability, and provider teams to integrate health signals into training and inference systems.
You might thrive in this role if you have:
7+ years of industry experience in software or infrastructure engineering.
Strong proficiency with Python and shell scripting.
Experience building large-scale distributed systems or infrastructure platforms.
Comfort digging into noisy operational data using SQL, PromQL, or similar tooling.
Experience building reproducible analyses and operational tooling.
Strong systems debugging and operational instincts with an ownership mindset.
Bonus if you have:
Experience with low-level hardware systems and Linux tooling (e.g. PCIe, InfiniBand, RoCE, networking, power management, kernel performance tuning, FW/SW debugging).
Experience operating or debugging large-scale GPU or accelerator clusters.
Expertise in network operations, observability, or systems telemetry.
Experience with automated remediation systems or fleet lifecycle management.
Experience improving reliability, utilization, or workload uptime in distributed compute environments.
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 Scaling, Frontiers Clusters. Its strongest career signal is the scope of the work itself — particularly Define and maintain health signals across GPUs, CPUs, networking, and platform infrastructure. — rather than a generic title alone.
Resume & Application Strategy
For the application, mirror the employer's language where it truthfully matches your background: foreground Scaling, Frontiers Clusters, 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.