Software Engineer, Frontier Clusters Infrastructure
Software Engineer, Frontier Clusters Infrastructure Location San Francisco Employment Type Full time Department Scaling Compensation $230K – $490K • 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 Frontier Systems team at OpenAI builds, launches, and supports the largest supercomputers in the world that OpenAI uses for its most cutting edge model training. We take data center designs, turn them into real, working systems and build any software needed for running large-scale frontier model trainings. Our mission is to bring up, stabilize and keep these hyperscale supercomputers reliable and efficient during the training of the frontier models. About the Role We are looking for engineers to operate the next generation of compute clusters that power OpenAI’s frontier research. This role blends distributed systems engineering with hands-on infrastructure work on our largest datacenters. You will scale Kubernetes clusters to massive scale, automate bare-metal bring-up, and build the software layer that hides the complexity of a magnitude of nodes across multiple data centers. You will work at the intersection of hardware and software, where speed and reliability are critical. Expect to manage fast-moving operations, quickly diagnose and fix issues when things are on fire, and continuously raise the bar for automation and uptime. In this role, you will: Spin up and scale large Kubernetes clusters, including automation for provisioning, bootstrapping, and cluster lifecycle management Build software abstractions that unify multiple clusters and present a seamless interface to training workloads Own node bring-up from bare metal through firmware upgrades, ensuring fast, repeatable deployment at massive scale Improve operational metrics such as reducing cluster restart times (e.g., from hours to minutes) and accelerating firmware or OS upgrade cycles Integrate networking and hardware health systems to deliver end-to-end reliability across servers, switches, and data center infrastructure Develop monitoring and observability systems to detect issues early and keep clusters stable under extreme load You might thrive in this role if you: Have deep experience operating or scaling Kubernetes clusters or similar container orchestration systems in high-growth or hyperscale environments Bring strong programming or scripting skills (Python, Go, or similar) and familiarity with Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation Are comfortable with bare-metal Linux environments, GPU hardware, and large-scale networking Enjoy solving fast-moving, high-impact operational problems and building automation to eliminate manual work Can balance careful engineering with the urgency of keeping mission-critical systems running Qualifications Experience as an infrastructure, systems, or distributed systems engineer in large-scale or high-availability environments Strong knowledge of Kubernetes internals, cluster scaling patterns, and containerized workloads Proficiency in cloud infrastructure concepts (compute, networking, storage, security) and in automating cluster or data center operations _Bonus: background with GPU workloads, firmware management, or high-performance computing_ 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.