# Software Engineer, Compute Foundations **Company**: OpenAI **Location**: San Francisco **Experience**: senior **Job type**: Full time **Salary**: $255K – $490K **Category**: Engineering **Industry**: Technology **Wikidata**: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q124605186 **Apply**: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/40f2f959-20f8-40ca-8b8c-154b6774193a?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply **Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_db59a815-7e0 ## Description ## Compensation 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. ## About the Team Compute Foundations builds the software that manages OpenAI’s GPU compute infrastructure across sites, data centers, and infrastructure providers, supporting model training and inference. Our systems turn large, heterogeneous fleets of machines into dependable compute for research and products. We build Kubernetes-based control planes, controllers, services, and APIs that coordinate the lifecycle of machines and clusters. We connect global infrastructure management with the realities of bare-metal systems, giving clients consistent interfaces across differences in hardware, topology, and provider behavior. ## About the Role You will build distributed systems that provision, configure, and manage compute throughout its lifecycle. Your work will connect global services and Kubernetes controllers with the systems that bring machines online, update them safely, and recover them when something goes wrong. This role combines software architecture with an understanding of how machines and data centers work. You might design a lifecycle API, improve controller performance under high concurrency and provider rate limits, or trace a provisioning failure from an API through reconciliation to network boot or host configuration. You will help these systems remain reliable as the fleet expands across sites and generations of GPU hardware. ## Responsibilities - Design, build, and operate Kubernetes-based controllers and distributed services that coordinate infrastructure across sites, isolate failures, and scale as GPU capacity grows. - Define APIs and resource models that let clients request and track lifecycle operations through consistent interfaces across hardware platforms and providers. - Build provisioning and configuration services that coordinate network boot, hardware management interfaces, and the deployment of firmware, operating-system images, drivers, and host configuration. - Develop lifecycle management for discovery, allocation, provisioning, upgrades, maintenance, recovery, and decommissioning, integrating with health and validation systems. - Design reliable reconciliation and recovery through concurrent changes, interrupted operations, and partial failures, with staged rollouts that limit disruption across nodes, racks, and clusters. - Improve control-plane throughput, API latency, and the time infrastructure takes to reach its desired state, while respecting the limits of site systems and provider APIs. - Build the software integrations that bring new sites and GPU hardware generations into the platform, partnering with hardware, networking, data-center, and other infrastructure teams. ## Requirements - Have strong software engineering fundamentals and experience designing, implementing, and owning production distributed systems or infrastructure services. - Have experience developing infrastructure systems that use Kubernetes APIs and reconciliation to manage resources. - Understand how a bare-metal node moves from power-on to a configured, workload-ready system, with depth in one or more areas such as PXE, DHCP/DNS, baseboard management controllers (BMCs), firmware, Linux, drivers, images, or configuration management. - Can design reliable APIs and asynchronous workflows, reasoning about concurrency, consistency, idempotency, and failures across service and provider boundaries. - Can diagnose reliability and performance problems across service, operating-system, and machine boundaries, turning production evidence into lasting software improvements. - Work effectively across engineering specialties and communicate system behavior and technical tradeoffs clearly. ## Nice to Have - Have built infrastructure control planes that coordinate operations across multiple sites or regions. - Have worked with GPU or HPC infrastructure, including topology and shared dependencies across machines, racks, or clusters. - Have integrated multiple hardware platforms or infrastructure providers into a common service or resource model. ## Skills ### Required - Kubernetes - distributed systems - software architecture - API design - infrastructure management ### Nice to have - GPU infrastructure - HPC infrastructure - multiple site coordination --- Source: [Apply at jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/40f2f959-20f8-40ca-8b8c-154b6774193a?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)