Software Engineer, Developer Productivity

United States, California, San Francisco 3180 18th Street (Show on map) Aug 19, 2026

About the Team

The Applied AI team safely brings OpenAI’s technology to the world. We released ChatGPT, Plugins, DALL*E, and the APIs for GPT-4, GPT-3, embeddings, and fine-tuning. We also operate inference infrastructure at scale. There’s a lot more on the immediate horizon.

We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth. We serve end-users directly through ChatGPT, and serve developers through our APIs, which power product features that were never before possible.

About the Role

The Engineering Acceleration team designs, builds and maintains the foundational systems that engineers use to build ChatGPT and the API. This is a fast-growing team and you will get a chance to own and define the strategy, vision, and plan for how to increase developer productivity.

In this role, you will:

• Drive the design, development, and implementation of tools, systems, and processes that accelerate engineering velocity, reduce manual effort, and increase the quality of output.
• Use our latest AI tools to re-think how we can be the most productive team in the industry.
• Work closely with various teams within OpenAI to understand their workflows, challenges, and needs, and ensure the tools and systems built by the Engineering Acceleration team address these requirements.
• Bring new features and research capabilities to the world by partnering with product engineers to lay the necessary technical foundations.
• Guide and advise product engineering teams on best practices for ensuring observable, scalable systems.
• Like all other teams, we are responsible for the reliability of the systems we build. This includes an on-call rotation to respond to critical incidents as needed.

• Have 5+ years of experience in engineering, including 3+ years of experience in infrastructure building tooling for developers.
• Have experience-driven empathy for the tools, frustrations, and processes that slow engineering teams down and lead to toil or burnout.
• Have a voracious and intrinsic desire to learn and fill in missing skills-and an equally strong talent for sharing learnings clearly and concisely with others.
• Are comfortable with ambiguity and rapidly changing conditions. You view changes as an opportunity to add structure and order when necessary.

As technical context: at the heart of our infrastructure is a large-scale deployment of GPU nodes running in dozens of Kubernetes clusters across regions. Some core technologies we build with include Terraform, Buildkite, Postgres, Cosmos DB, Kafka, Python, and FastAPI.

This role is exclusively based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employee.

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., At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.