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OpenAI

Software Engineer, Frontier Systems

OpenAI
onsite senior full-time $250K – $445K • Offers Equity San Francisco
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First indexed 6 Mar 2026

Description

Software Engineer, Frontier Systems

Location

San Francisco

Employment Type

Full time

Department

Scaling

Compensation

  • $250K – $445K • 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.

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.

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

On the Frontier Systems team, you’ll build critical infrastructure that keeps our supercomputers running reliably for cutting-edge AI research. Even a single hardware failure can derail a large-scale training run, so minimizing disruptions is core to the mission.

Engineers here own their work end-to-end and are trusted to make a real impact. This role is for someone who goes deep - who thrives on root-causing system-level issues and building automation to catch and fix problems at scale.

In this role, you will:

  • Own and improve the system health checks that keep our hyperscale supercomputers stable during model training.
  • Lead deep dives into hardware failures and system-level bugs to understand how things break at scale.
  • Build automation that monitors and fixes issues across thousands of machines - so researchers can keep moving without interruption.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

  • 7+ years of industry experience in software engineering
  • Proficiency with Python and shell scripting
  • A high degree of comfort digging into noisy data with SQL, PromQL, and Pandas or any other tool necessary
  • Experience developing reproducible analyses
  • A balance of strengths in building and operationalizing

Prior hardware expertise is not required for this role.

Bonus if you have:

  • Experience with low level details of hardware components, protocols, and associated Linux tooling (e.g., PCIe, Infiniband, networking, power management, kernel perf tuning)
  • Experience with visualization of large data centers and networks.
  • Expertise with network operations and tooling
  • Expertise with power management and stabilization

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.

This listing is enriched and indexed by YubHub. To apply, use the employer's original posting: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/d7efc55b-2fde-4d3f-ae34-2e467f02a57c