OpenAI

Software Engineer, Product Velocity

OpenAI • $150K — $180K *
Information Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of experience in large-scale developer infrastructure or build systems
  • Proficient in debugging distributed systems and CI/CD pipelines
  • Familiarity with tools like Bazel, Buildkite, and Kubernetes
  • Ability to think productively about developer experience and workflow
  • Strong communication skills for cross-team collaboration
  • Experience in automating manual processes while maintaining safety requirements
  • Passion for making impactful improvements that enhance productivity

Responsibilities

  • Reduce iteration latency for developers in local environments
  • Enhance Bazel and build performance across development and deployment
  • Increase CI reliability and improve merge throughput
  • Develop agents to facilitate PR progress and conflict resolution
  • Create self-healing deploy pipelines to reduce manual intervention
  • Enhance deploy observability to track changes and identify bottlenecks
  • Establish metrics to evaluate impact on development cycles

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health and wellness plans
  • Flexible working hours and remote work options
  • Opportunities for professional development and certifications
  • Collaborative and innovative work culture
  • Access to cutting-edge tools and technology
Full Job Description
About the Team

The ChatGPT Velocity team owns the health of the end-to-end developer and deploy loop for ChatGPT-facing services. Our mission is to help ChatGPT engineers ship confidently with a fast, lightweight development cycle and a trusted path to production.

ChatGPT development depends on a long chain: local environments, Bazel builds, CI, tests, merges, release candidates, deploys, synthetics, alerts, and production health. When any link is slow, flaky, or unclear, engineers lose hours, fixes reach users later, and on-call load rises. This team turns that cross-cutting drag into owned, measured, and durable improvements.

About the Role

We are hiring an experienced infrastructure engineer to make ChatGPT development dramatically faster and more reliable. You will work across local development, build systems, CI, deployment infrastructure, test ownership, and production safety signals to reduce the time and attention required to move a healthy change from development to production.

This is not a narrow tooling role. The best person for this job will be comfortable diagnosing messy distributed systems, reading developer pain signals from Slack and metrics, building reliable automation, negotiating ownership across teams, and making tradeoffs between velocity and production safety. You should enjoy treating engineers as users and turning confusing workflow failures into clear, measured systems.

In this role, you will:
  • Reduce local development startup and iteration latency for ChatGPT engineers
  • Improve Bazel and build performance for local machines, devboxes, and CI, including cache effectiveness, reproducibility, disk usage, remote cache behavior, and observability into invalidations.
  • Improve CI reliability and merge throughput by reducing unrelated failures, tail latency, flaky or mis-owned tests, quarantine friction, and repeated manual reruns.
  • Build agents that help PRs make forward progress: rebasing, conflict resolution, CI triage, safe reruns, owner routing, and clear identification of external blockers.
  • Make deploy pipelines more self-healing, especially when transient alerts, known-bad clusters, recovered synthetics, stale RCs, or noisy gates should not require human babysitting.
  • Improve deploy observability so engineers can quickly tell where a change is, what is blocking it, whether the signal is trustworthy, and who owns the next action.
  • Establish lightweight metrics for before-and-after impact, such as commit-to-prod latency, deploy-window throughput, CI tail latency, local bootup time, failure rates, manual interventions, false-positive gates, and developer-reported pain.

You might thrive in this role if you:
  • Have strong experience with large-scale developer infrastructure, build systems, CI/CD, deployment systems, or production reliability.
  • Can debug across local machines, devboxes, remote caches, monorepos, service dependencies, auth systems, and distributed deploy pipelines.
  • Are comfortable with systems like Bazel, Buildkite, Kubernetes, Temporal, Python/TypeScript services, GitHub workflows, and large monorepo tooling, or can ramp quickly on equivalents.
  • Think in product loops as much as systems loops: you care whether developers can understand and trust the workflow, not just whether a subsystem is technically healthy.
  • Know how to replace repeated manual intervention with policy-backed automation while preserving production safety.
  • Communicate well across teams and can turn ambiguous "this is slow/broken/flaky" reports into crisp owners, hypotheses, metrics, and shipped fixes.
  • Prefer practical measurement over vibes, while still knowing that developer frustration is often the first signal of a real systems problem.
  • Are energized by high-leverage work where a small improvement can save hundreds of engineering hours.

Nice to have:
  • Experience improving developer experience in a very large monorepo.
  • Experience with remote execution, remote caching, hermetic builds, or cache reproducibility.
  • Experience designing CI quarantine, test ownership, merge queue, or auto-revert systems.
  • Experience with progressive delivery, canary/preview/stable deploy pipelines, synthetics, alert quality, and deploy-manager style workflows.
  • Experience building agent-assisted developer workflows, such as automated PR babysitting, CI triage, or conflict resolution.
  • Familiarity with security and access-control constraints around secrets, internal auth, VPN/exit-node networking, and local development.


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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