OpenAI

Software Engineer, Search Infrastructure

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

Qualifications

  • 5+ years in large-scale distributed systems design and operation
  • Hands-on experience with search, information retrieval, or ML infrastructure
  • Strong programming and debugging skills across multiple languages
  • Ability to translate complex requirements into actionable technical plans
  • Adept at collaborating across teams and driving projects from inception to deployment

Responsibilities

  • Design search classification, retrieval, ranking, and inference systems
  • Enhance latency, throughput, and infrastructure efficiency
  • Develop experimentation tools for running A/B tests and measuring outcomes
  • Ensure production reliability with observability and incident response
  • Create APIs for reliable information retrieval while maintaining access controls

Benefits

  • Hybrid work model: 3 days in-office per week
  • Relocation assistance for new employees
  • Opportunity to work on impactful AI technology
  • Collaborative environment with researchers and engineers
Full Job Description
About the Role

As a senior engineer on the Search Product Infrastructure team, you will design, build, and operate the systems that connect models with search at ChatGPT scale. You will tackle challenges in search orchestration, inference efficiency, experimentation, and production reliability, making tradeoffs that directly shape answer quality and user experience. Working closely with researchers and partner engineering teams, you will own projects from technical design through launch and iteration, evolving the architecture as models, product capabilities, and demand grow.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:
  • Design and evolve the services that coordinate search classification, retrieval, ranking, and model inference, working closely with researchers and partner engineering teams to bring new capabilities into production.
  • Improve end-to-end latency, throughput, and infrastructure efficiency through profiling, caching, request routing, and capacity planning, making informed tradeoffs between search quality, reliability, and compute cost.
  • Build experimentation tooling and automation to run reproducible A/B tests, define success metrics, and measure product impact. Use shadow traffic and load testing to validate system behavior, estimate capacity needs, and support safe production rollouts.
  • Own production reliability through observability, resilient fallback behavior, incident response, and automation that improves launch safety and reduces operational toil.
  • Build search APIs and tool interfaces that enable models and agents to retrieve information reliably while respecting access controls and preserving source attribution.

You might thrive in this role if you:
  • Have significant experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, with depth in performance, reliability, or resource efficiency.
  • Bring experience in one or more of search, information retrieval, ML infrastructure, inference serving, or other high-throughput online systems.
  • Have strong programming and systems debugging skills, and are comfortable working across languages and unfamiliar parts of a production stack.
  • Can turn ambiguous product or research needs into clear technical plans, align partners across teams, and carry projects through deployment and measurable results.
  • Enjoy learning across systems and ML, investigating unfamiliar problems, and sharing technical decisions and lessons clearly with others.


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.

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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