Software Engineer, Platform Systems

OpenAI
San Francisco2026-01-23

About the job

As a Software Engineer, Platform Systems, you will design and build distributed systems that provide visibility into large-scale training workloads and help operate them reliably at scale. You’ll work on failure detection, tracing, and observability systems that identify slow or faulty nodes, surface performance bottlenecks, and help engineers understand and optimize massive distributed training jobs. This infrastructure is critical to operating OpenAI’s training stack and is actively evolving to support new use cases and increasingly complex workloads.

Responsibilities

Design and build distributed failure detection, tracing, and profiling systems for large-scale AI training jobs

Develop tooling to identify slow, faulty, or misbehaving nodes and provide actionable visibility into system behavior

Improve observability, reliability, and performance across OpenAI’s training platform

Debug and resolve issues in complex, high-throughput distributed systems

Collaborate with systems, infrastructure, and research teams to evolve platform capabilities

Extend and adapt failure detection systems or tracing systems to support new training paradigms and workloads

Qualifications

Minimum

Care deeply about performance, stability, and observability in distributed systems

Enjoy finding and fixing issues in large-scale systems and automating operational workflows

Have experience writing low-level software where system details matter

Understand hardware, operating systems, networking, concurrency, and distributed systems

Preferred

Care deeply about performance, stability, and observability in distributed systems

Enjoy finding and fixing issues in large-scale systems and automating operational workflows

Have experience writing low-level software where system details matter

Understand hardware, operating systems, networking, concurrency, and distributed systems

Have a background in high-performance computing or low-level systems engineering

Are excited to work on critical infrastructure that powers frontier AI research