OpenAI

Research Infrastructure Engineer, Training Systems

OpenAI$130K — $180K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of experience in systems engineering or similar role
  • Deep understanding of ML training infrastructure and workflows
  • Proficiency in Python and PyTorch
  • Experience with distributed systems and cloud environments
  • Strong debugging skills across various domains including networking and storage

Responsibilities

  • Build and maintain infrastructure for large-scale model training and experimentation.
  • Design user-friendly APIs and interfaces for training workflows.
  • Enhance reliability and performance of data pipelines.
  • Identify and debug complex issues across multiple technical domains.
  • Develop tests and benchmarks to monitor system regressions.

Benefits

  • Opportunity to work on cutting-edge ML research.
  • Impactful role directly connected to model releases.
  • Potential for professional growth in a dynamic environment.
  • Collaborative team culture focused on innovation.
  • Access to advanced tools and technologies for system development.
Full Job Description
About The Team

The team works on research and systems that advance frontier models. Our work often goes beyond standard training recipes, which means we also build the infrastructure needed to make new training approaches practical at scale. This is a team where systems work is directly tied to research progress: better tools, abstractions, and runtimes can unlock experiments that would otherwise be too slow, brittle, or difficult to express.

About The Role

This is a systems engineering role focused on ML training infrastructure. You will work on the systems layer that turns novel research ideas into runnable, measurable training workloads for large models. The work can sit on the critical path for model releases, bringing both the excitement of direct impact and the responsibility of building systems that remain reliable under real pressure.

In This Role, You Will
  • Build and maintain infrastructure for large-scale model training and experimentation.
  • Design APIs and interfaces that make complex training workflows easier to express and harder to misuse.
  • Improve reliability, debuggability, and performance across training and data pipelines.
  • Debug issues spanning Python, PyTorch, distributed systems, GPUs, networking, and storage.
  • Write tests, benchmarks, and diagnostics that catch meaningful regressions.

You Might Thrive In This Role If You
  • You want to build systems that enable new model training approaches, not just optimize established ones.
  • You have strong systems instincts and care deeply about performance, reliability, and clean abstractions.
  • You have good taste in API and interface design, with empathy for the researchers and engineers using your tools.
  • You are comfortable working across ML research code and production-quality infrastructure.
  • You enjoy debugging from evidence: profiles, traces, logs, tests, and minimal reproductions.

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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