OpenAI

Engineering Manager, ChatGPT Search Infrastructure

OpenAI$160K — $190K *
Information Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of experience managing engineering teams focused on high-scale infrastructure or distributed systems.
  • Strong technical expertise in backend infrastructure, APIs, and low-latency serving.
  • Experience in building shared platforms for independent feature development by other teams.
  • Proficient in search orchestration, indexing, retrieval, or AI model integration.
  • Demonstrated ability to lead complex projects and manage engineering and product teams effectively.

Responsibilities

  • Define the technical strategy and roadmap for ChatGPT Search infrastructure.
  • Lead and mentor a team of engineers, fostering a culture of accountability and high standards.
  • Develop reusable platforms for Search product teams to launch features independently.
  • Collaborate with Post-Training teams on model launches and experiments.
  • Evolve Search system architecture with Inference and Indexing partners to optimize performance.
  • Ensure service availability of at least 99.9% with necessary latency and scalability.
  • Establish strong engineering practices across various technical domains.

Benefits

  • Work in a high-trust, inclusive team culture focused on engineering excellence.
  • Lead an experienced team contributing to innovative AI infrastructure.
  • Opportunity to shape the architecture and operations of a globally used platform.
  • Engage in cross-functional partnerships with diverse teams across product and technical domains.
Full Job Description
About the Team

The ChatGPT Search Infrastructure team builds the foundational systems that power search experiences across ChatGPT. We develop the infrastructure that connects models with search systems and other sources of real-time information, enabling ChatGPT to deliver timely, relevant, and trustworthy answers to users around the world.

Our work sits at the intersection of product engineering, AI, and large-scale infrastructure. We build shared platforms and abstractions that enable product teams to independently develop, evaluate, and launch new search-powered experiences. These platforms provide the guardrails, testing capabilities, observability, and rollout controls needed to prevent reliability, scalability, quality, and latency regressions while supporting rapid product iteration.

The team partners closely with:
  • Post-Training on model launches, experimentation, and prompt optimization
  • Search product verticals on new user experiences
  • Inference on GPU efficiencies
  • Indexing and Retrieval on the systems that identify and deliver relevant information
  • Capacity/Fleet team to ensure optimal regionalized provisioning of GPUs and CPUs

About the Role

We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the team responsible for ChatGPT's Search Infrastructure.

You will set the technical and organizational direction for the systems that bring search capabilities into ChatGPT. You will guide architectural decisions across search orchestration, model and prompt integration, serving infrastructure, experimentation, observability, evaluation, and product integrations. You will balance immediate launch and product needs with the long-term reliability, scalability, latency, and maintainability of the platform.

A central responsibility of this role is creating leverage for Search product verticals. You will lead the development of extensible platforms that allow those teams to independently build, test, and launch features without requiring ongoing involvement from the core infrastructure team. These platforms must include strong interfaces and automated guardrails that enable fast iteration while protecting the reliability, scalability, latency, and quality of ChatGPT Search.

This role requires technical depth across the full Search stack and the ability to understand and influence systems owned by partner teams. You will be expected to develop a coherent technical direction across model behavior, inference, search orchestration, indexing, retrieval, experimentation, and infrastructure-even when execution spans multiple organizational boundaries.

You will lead multiple complex workstreams, empower experienced engineers to own major technical areas, and partner with product, research, Post-Training, Search Quality, Inference, Indexing, Retrieval, and infrastructure teams to translate emerging model and search capabilities into reliable experiences operating at global scale.

In this role, you will:
  • Define and drive the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for ChatGPT Search Infrastructure, spanning search orchestration, APIs, model and prompt integration, serving, experimentation, evaluation, observability, and product integrations.
  • Lead and develop a team of experienced engineers, create meaningful ownership opportunities, and foster an inclusive, high-trust culture with clear accountability and high standards.
  • Partner with Post-Training on model launches, A/B experiments, search-behavior evaluation, and prompt optimization, translating model improvements into production-ready product experiences.
  • Build reusable platforms that enable Search product vertical teams to independently implement, test, and launch features, with automated guardrails that protect reliability, scalability, quality, and latency.
  • Partner with Inference, Indexing, and Retrieval teams to evolve the end-to-end Search architecture, adapt serving optimizations, and improve product outcomes across the stack.
  • Define and uphold service objectives of at least 99.9% availability, sub-second latency where required by the user experience, and the scalability needed to support ChatGPT's continued growth.
  • Establish strong engineering practices across system design, testability, observability, experimentation, capacity planning, rollout safety, operational readiness, and incident prevention.
  • Independently lead multiple complex workstreams, remove technical and organizational bottlenecks, and build alignment across product, research, and infrastructure teams in ambiguous and rapidly changing environments.

You might thrive in this role if you:
  • Have experience managing senior engineers and leading teams responsible for complex, high-scale infrastructure, online serving, or distributed systems.
  • Bring significant technical depth in backend infrastructure, platform engineering, APIs, low-latency serving, experimentation platforms, or AI-powered product development.
  • Understand how models, prompts, inference systems, search orchestration, indexing, retrieval, and infrastructure work together to deliver an end-to-end user experience.
  • Have partnered with research or Post-Training teams to launch models, run controlled experiments, evaluate model behavior, or optimize prompts in production.
  • Have built shared platforms that allow other engineering teams to independently develop and launch features within well-defined reliability, scalability, quality, and performance guardrails.
  • Have shaped the architecture of systems with demanding availability, latency, and scale requirements, with testability, observability, safe rollout, and operational excellence built in from the outset.
  • Can move comfortably between technical depth, product strategy, organizational leadership, and people management while exercising strong judgment in ambiguous environments.
  • Build strong cross-functional partnerships, empower experienced engineers to lead, and care deeply about developing people and creating an inclusive, sustainable team culture.


About OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. The company was founded in 2015 by a group of technology leaders, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and John Schulman. OpenAI's mission is to develop and promote friendly AI for the betterment of humanity. The company has developed a number of cutting-edge AI technologies, including GPT-3, a language processing system that can generate human-like text. OpenAI has received funding from a number of high-profile investors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Learn more about OpenAI
Size
100 employees
Industry
Founded
2015

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