Software Engineer, Compute - Storage

About the TeamThe Storage Infrastructure team builds and operates the storage foundation behind OpenAI’s most demanding workloads. We work directly with research to design storage systems for rapidly evolving experiments, while also powering production at scale. We own the platform end to end: backend systems, user-facing services and APIs, and the control planes that manage how data is placed, moved, and retained over time.Our stack spans cloud and in-house object stores across very different workload profiles, from GPU-attached systems to dedicated storage hardware. We also build the federation layer that unifies these backends behind a simple interface and routes each workload to the right storage solution.About the RoleYou will help build the storage platform that powers OpenAI’s research and production systems. This is a hands-on infrastructure role for engineers who want to work on deeply technical systems at scale and own them in production.You’ll work across object storage, cross-region data movement, lifecycle management, and the federation layer that provides a unified interface across multiple backends. Much of our stack runs on Kubernetes, and we primarily build services in Rust.In this role, you will:Build and operate storage services that underpin OpenAI’s research infrastructureDevelop object storage systems across cloud and in-house environmentsBuild systems for cross-region data movement, replication, and recoveryDesign lifecycle management capabilities that keep data durable, available, and cost-effectiveEvolve the federation layer that unifies multiple backend systems behind a simple interfaceImprove performance, reliability, and operational excellence across the platformCollaborate closely with researchers and infrastructure teams to support rapidly evolving workloadsYou might thrive in this role if you:Have experience building or operating distributed systems in productionHave worked on storage infrastructure, object stores, distributed filesystems, or other data-intensive backend systemsEnjoy owning infrastructure end to end, including debugging and long-term reliability improvementsWrite strong production code, ideally in Rust or another systems-oriented languageAre comfortable working with Kubernetes-based systemsHave experience with tools such as Terraform, Grafana, or similar infrastructure and observability toolingAbout OpenAIOpenAI 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. We are an