Description
Engineering Manager, Cloud Infrastructure Automation
Location
San Francisco
Employment Type
Full time
Location Type
Hybrid
Department
Applied AI
Compensation
- $293K – $385K • Offers Equity
The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
- Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
- 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
- Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
- Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
- 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
- Mental health and wellness support
- Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
- Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
- Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
- Relocation support for eligible employees
- Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.
More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.
This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.
About the Team
The Cloud Infrastructure team builds and operates the foundational platform that powers OpenAI’s production AI systems. We own large-scale Kubernetes platforms, cluster lifecycle and upgrades, global networking and traffic routing, service mesh, and the automation and guardrails that make the system reliable, secure, and scalable by default.
Our mission is to make infrastructure predictable and boring at massive scale—so research and product teams can move fast without compromising safety, reliability, or efficiency. We operate at the intersection of platform engineering, distributed systems, and global networking, supporting products used by millions of users worldwide.
About the Role
We are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead core Cloud Infrastructure teams responsible for OpenAI’s Kubernetes-based platform. This role is fundamentally about platform leadership: building teams, setting technical direction, and delivering infrastructure primitives that scale with OpenAI’s growth.
You will manage engineers working on cluster lifecycle, infrastructure automation, reliability mechanisms, and networking foundations. You will partner closely with adjacent infrastructure, security, and product teams to ensure the platform can support rapid expansion in scale, regions, and workloads.
This is a high-ownership leadership role with direct responsibility for production systems operating at extreme scale.
In this role, you will:
- Build, lead, and grow high-performing infrastructure engineering teams.
- Own the evolution of OpenAI’s Kubernetes platform, including cluster lifecycle, upgrades, configuration standards, and safety mechanisms.
- Set and enforce platform-level reliability goals (SLIs/SLOs), ensuring reliability is designed into the system.
- Drive infrastructure automation across provisioning, upgrades, remediation, and fleet consistency using Terraform and internal tooling.
- Reduce operational toil and incident frequency through better abstractions, guardrails, and self-healing systems.
- Establish clear ownership boundaries, technical direction, and execution discipline.
You might thrive in this role if you:
- Have significant experience managing infrastructure or platform engineering teams.
- Bring deep hands-on understanding of Kubernetes at scale and distributed systems.
- Have operated production infrastructure with strict reliability, latency, and security requirements.
- Can balance technical depth with organizational leadership and long-term strategy.
- Have a strong track record of hiring, developing, and retaining senior engineers.
- Are comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and creating clarity for others.
Technical Environment
- Kubernetes across many clusters and regions
- Service mesh (Istio / Envoy)
- Global networking and load balancing (Cloudflare, cloud-native primitives)
- Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and internal automation
- Observability via metrics, logging, and tracing
- Large-scale production systems with high reliability and safety requirements
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.