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Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md). --- # Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure - Research - **Company:** OpenAI Inc. - **Location:** San Francisco, CA, United States - **Salary:** $250,000.0 - **Contract:** Permanent contract - **Skills:** Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Data Infrastructure, Software Debugging, Distributed Data Store, Distributed Systems, OpenAI, Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), Large Language Models, Real Time Data, Api Design, Data Pipelines - **Published:** October 1, 2026 - **Apply:** https://diversityjobs.com/main/sendform/8/8/28176/1/14133191?backUrl=%2Fcareer%2F14133191%2FSoftware-Engineer-Data-Infrastructure-Research-California-San-Francisco ## About the Role * Have strong engineering fundamentals with experience in distributed systems, data pipelines, or infrastructure. * Have experience building APIs, modular code, and scalable abstractions, while recognizing that abstractions ultimately serve the users and UX is an important part of the abstractions design. * Are comfortable debugging bottlenecks across large fleets of machines. * Take pride in building infrastructure that "just works," and find joy in being the guardian of reliability and scale. * Are collaborative, humble, and excited to own a foundational (if not glamorous) part of the ML stack. Bonus points if you: * Have background knowledge in data math, probability, or distributed data theory. * Have worked with GPU-scale distributed systems or dataset scaling for real-time data ## Description The Workload team is responsible for designing and running OpenAI's LLM training and inference infrastructure that powers frontier models at massive scale. Our systems unify how researchers train and serve models, abstracting away the complexity of performance, parallelism, and execution across vast GPU/accelerator fleets. By providing this foundation, the Workload team ensures that researchers can focus on advancing model capabilities while we handle the scale, efficiency, and reliability required to bring those models to life., We are looking for an engineer to design and implement the dataset infrastructure that powers OpenAI's next-generation training stack. You will be responsible for building standardized dataset interfaces, scaling pipelines across thousands of GPUs, and proactively testing performance bottlenecks. In this role, you will collaborate closely with the multimodal researchers, and other infra groups to ensure datasets are unified, efficient, and easy to consume. In this role, you will: * Design and maintain standardized dataset APIs, including for multimodal (MM) data that cannot fit in memory. * Build proactive testing and scale validation pipelines for dataset loading at GPU scale. * Collaborate with teammates to integrate datasets seamlessly into training and inference pipelines, ensuring smooth adoption and a great user experience. * Document and maintain dataset interfaces so they are discoverable, consistent, and easy for other teams to adopt. * Establish safeguards and validation systems to ensure datasets remain reproducible and unchanged once standardized. * Debug and resolve performance bottlenecks in distributed dataset loading (e.g., straggler systems slowing global training). * Provide visualization and inspection tools to surface errors, bugs, or bottlenecks in datasets. ## Related Videos - [Develop AI-powered Applications with OpenAI Embeddings and Azure Search](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/828-develop-ai-powered-applications-with-openai-embeddings-and-azure-search) - [API Design - Getting Started](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/33-api-design-getting-started) - [Convert batch code into streaming with Python](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/857-convert-batch-code-into-streaming-with-python) - [Developer Experience, Platform Engineering and AI powered Apps](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/990-developer-experience-platform-engineering-and-ai-powered-apps) - [Coding an Immersive Copilot using Unity / .NET and Azure OpenAI!](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1204-coding-an-immersive-copilot-using-unity-net-and-azure-openai) - [Shipping Faster with Less: Render on Cloud Hosting, AI Workloads, and the Future of DevOps](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1894-shipping-faster-with-less-render-on-cloud-hosting-ai-workloads-and-the-future-of-devops) ## Related Articles - [How to Become an AI Engineer](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/331-how-to-become-an-ai-engineer) - [MLOps And AI Driven Development](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/82-mlops-and-ai-driven-development) - [Dev Digest 137 - AI'm not sure about this](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/485-dev-digest-137-ai-m-not-sure-about-this) - [Navigating the AI Shift](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/629-navigating-the-ai-shift) - [Dev Digest 120 - Apple and peers](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/455-dev-digest-120-apple-and-peers) - [Highest Paying Tech Companies for Developers](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/220-highest-paying-tech-companies-for-developers)