Software Engineer, Foundations Retrieval

We're looking for a Software Engineer focused on building and scaling retrieval systems. You'll work with a team of researchers and engineers to develop infrastructure that enables models to retrieve and act on the right information at the right time. This includes designing and operating indexing systems, retrieval pipelines, and serving layers.

This work supports retrieval across OpenAI products and research, with direct impact on system performance, reliability, and scale.

Responsibilities:

• Build and scale retrieval infrastructure across indexing, serving, and query execution.
• Develop low-latency, high-throughput systems for real-time model interaction.
• Partner with research to productionize embedding and retrieval techniques.
• Support dense, sparse, and hybrid retrieval pipelines.
• Own system performance, reliability, and observability at scale.
• Collaborate across Pretraining, Inference, and Product teams to integrate retrieval end-to-end.
• Contribute to model - system interfaces for agentic workflows.

You Might Thrive in This Role If You Have:

• Experience building and scaling distributed systems.
• Background in search, retrieval, or indexing systems.
• Familiarity with embedding-based or ML-powered systems.
• Experience with performance optimization and production reliability.
• Ability to work across ML and systems boundaries.
• First-principles thinking in ambiguous problem spaces.