About the Team
The IP Infrastructure team builds and operates the systems that enable OpenAI to share research and engineering technology securely and reliably with strategic partners. Our work spans continuously running pipelines for model weights, configurations, code, and container images.
We work closely with research, security, developer infrastructure, and partner engineering teams to turn complex requirements into dependable software. We’re a small, collaborative team with direct ownership of systems that support important partnerships.
About the Role
We’re looking for a software engineer to build and improve the backend services behind these workflows. You’ll work primarily in Python, take projects from design through production, and make our systems more reliable and easier to operate as partner integrations evolve.
The work combines hands-on engineering with careful judgment. You’ll translate requirements about what can be shared into clear, testable business logic, debug problems across system boundaries, and collaborate with the teams that build and use the underlying infrastructure.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week.
In this role, you will
Build and maintain automated pipelines that transfer model weights, configurations, code, and container images between OpenAI and partner environments
Implement the validation and business logic that determines how artifacts are prepared and shared
Improve production reliability through testing, monitoring, useful diagnostics, and robust failure handling
Integrate services with source control, object storage, and build and container tooling, working closely with the owners of shared infrastructure
Partner with researchers, security teams, and external engineers to understand requirements and resolve integration problems
Improve existing workflows and use AI tools where they can make the systems we build more effective
You might thrive in this role if you
Have strong Python skills and experience building, testing, and debugging backend software
Have taken a service, pipeline, or automation project from implementation into production and helped keep it reliable
Enjoy investigating how systems fit together and tracing problems across services and dependencies
Can turn ambiguous requirements into practical software while exercising sound judgment around sensitive information
Communicate clearly with technical and nontechnical collaborators and enjoy working with partner engineering teams
Learn unfamiliar systems quickly and take responsibility for following problems through to resolution
Experience with cloud services, object storage, containers, or CI/CD is helpful. Our work involves tools such as Docker, Bazel, and Buildkite, but prior expertise in every tool or a particular cloud provider is not required.