Software Engineer, Compute Foundations

About the RoleYou will build distributed systems that provision, configure, and manage compute throughout its lifecycle. Your work will connect global services and Kubernetes controllers with the systems that bring machines online, update them safely, and recover them when something goes wrong.This role combines software architecture with an understanding of how machines and data centers work. You might design a lifecycle API, improve controller performance under high concurrency and provider rate limits, or trace a provisioning failure from an API through reconciliation to network boot or host configuration. You will help these systems remain reliable as the fleet expands across sites and generations of GPU hardware.We value depth in relevant systems and the ability to connect layers. You do not need to arrive as an expert in every component of the stack.In This Role, You Will:Design, build, and operate Kubernetes-based controllers and distributed services that coordinate infrastructure across sites, isolate failures, and scale as GPU capacity grows.Define APIs and resource models that let clients request and track lifecycle operations through consistent interfaces across hardware platforms and providers.Build provisioning and configuration services that coordinate network boot, hardware management interfaces, and the deployment of firmware, operating-system images, drivers, and host configuration.Develop lifecycle management for discovery, allocation, provisioning, upgrades, maintenance, recovery, and decommissioning, integrating with health and validation systems.Design reliable reconciliation and recovery through concurrent changes, interrupted operations, and partial failures, with staged rollouts that limit disruption across nodes, racks, and clusters.Improve control-plane throughput, API latency, and the time infrastructure takes to reach its desired state, while respecting the limits of site systems and provider APIs.Build the software integrations that bring new sites and GPU hardware generations into the platform, partnering with hardware, networking, data-center, and other infrastructure teams.You Might Thrive in This Role If You:Have strong software engineering fundamentals and experience designing, implementing, and owning production distributed systems or infrastructure services.Have experience developing infrastructure systems that use Kubernetes APIs and reconciliation to manage resources.Understand how a bare-metal node moves from power-on to a configured, workload-ready system, with depth in one or more areas such as PXE, DHCP/DNS, baseboard management controllers (BMCs), firmware, Linux, drivers, images, or configuration management.Can design reliable APIs and asynchronous workflows, reasoning about concurrency, consistency, idempotency, and failures across service and provider boundaries.Can diagnose reliability and performance problems across service, operating-system, and machine boundaries, turning production evidence into lasting software improvements.Work effectively across engineering specialties and communicate system behavior and technical tradeoffs clearly.About 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.We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.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.