OpenAI - Software Engineer, ChatGPT Infrastructure

London, Greater London, United Kingdom£194k - £280k+ Equity3w ago

In Office Mid EMEA Diagnostics Cloud Computing Software Engineer Infrastructure Engineer

Requirements

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant experience building backend or distributed systems. • Strong proficiency in at least one general-purpose programming language and experience writing reliable, maintainable production code. • Experience designing, building, or improving services, platforms, or shared infrastructure at scale. • Familiarity with production reliability practices, including monitoring, incident response, root-cause analysis, and operational readiness. • Experience diagnosing performance, scalability, or reliability issues in production environments. • Understanding of distributed systems, data storage, concurrency, asynchronous processing, or networking. • Familiarity with modern deployment, observability, and cloud infrastructure practices. • Ability to lead complex technical work and collaborate effectively across product and infrastructure teams. • Experience with cloud infrastructure, containerized environments, or observability tools is useful but not required. We welcome candidates from backend engineering, distributed systems, platform engineering, and reliability backgrounds. • 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.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain backend systems supporting high-traffic ChatGPT experiences. • Develop shared services, APIs, and infrastructure that help product teams build and launch new capabilities safely. • Improve the performance, scalability, and efficiency of production systems as usage and product complexity grow. • Build and improve systems for asynchronous processing and other large-scale backend workloads. • Lead architectural improvements and infrastructure migrations while maintaining correctness, compatibility, and safe rollout and rollback. • Strengthen monitoring, alerting, and diagnostics to detect problems early and reduce customer impact. • Participate in on-call, incident response, and root-cause analysis, and turn operational learnings into lasting engineering improvements. • Work across product and infrastructure teams to ensure new systems are reliable, secure, and production-ready. • Build automation and tooling that reduce repetitive operational work and improve engineering effectiveness. • Have experience building and operating backend systems at scale. • Understand distributed systems concepts such as concurrency, consistency, asynchronous processing, and failure handling. • Enjoy writing production code while taking ownership of how systems behave in real-world conditions. • Can identify and address bottlenecks affecting latency, throughput, resource usage, or reliability. • Have experience introducing production changes safely through testing, staged rollouts, monitoring, and rollback plans. • Are comfortable investigating ambiguous technical problems and collaborating across teams to resolve them. • Care about clear interfaces, maintainable systems, and practical engineering tradeoffs. • Take ownership of projects from design and implementation through deployment and ongoing improvement.

Benefits

• London£194K – £280K • 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. • Our London-based team builds the backend systems that help ChatGPT scale reliably. We work on infrastructure close to the product, partnering with engineering teams to improve the performance, resilience, and operability of critical user-facing systems. • Our work combines backend software engineering with distributed systems and production reliability. We build shared capabilities, improve high-traffic workflows, and make it easier to introduce new product functionality without compromising performance or availability. • This role is for software engineers who want to build and evolve backend systems operating at significant scale. You’ll write production code, design shared infrastructure, and solve technical challenges involving performance, distributed systems, and system reliability. • You’ll also own how those systems behave in production: how changes are rolled out, how issues are detected and diagnosed, and how recurring operational problems can be addressed through better software and system design. • This is a strong fit for backend engineers who enjoy complex systems problems and want a direct connection between the infrastructure they build and the experience of ChatGPT users.