Software Engineer, Foundations Search

Software Engineer, Foundations Search

Foundations - San Francisco

About the Team

Foundations Research team works on high‑risk, high‑reward ideas that could shape the next decade of AI. Our goal is to advance the science and data that enable our training and scaling efforts, with a particular focus on future frontier models. Pushing the boundaries of data, scaling laws, optimization techniques, model architectures, and efficiency improvements to propel our science.

The Search team sits within Foundations, building agentic search by co‑designing model‑system interfaces with the core search stack (serving, indexing, retrieval) to translate model intent into reliable, real‑world actions. Operating at the frontier of AI and information retrieval, the team develops large‑scale systems that transform and index vast corpora, enabling models to reason over global knowledge and act dependably. In close partnership with researchers, we rapidly bring modeling breakthroughs into production and redefine how intelligent systems discover, retrieve, and synthesize information at planetary scale.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Software Engineer focused on building and scaling retrieval systems. You’ll work with a team of researchers and engineers to develop infrastructure that enables models to retrieve and act on the right information at the right time. This includes designing and operating indexing systems, retrieval pipelines, and serving layers.

This work supports retrieval across OpenAI products and research, with direct impact on system performance, reliability, and scale.

Responsibilities

• Build and scale retrieval infrastructure across indexing, serving, and query execution.
• Develop low‑latency, high‑throughput systems for real‑time model interaction.
• Partner with research to productionize embedding and retrieval techniques.
• Support dense, sparse, and hybrid retrieval pipelines.
• Own system performance, reliability, and observability at scale.
• Collaborate across Pretraining, Inference, and Product teams to integrate retrieval end‑to‑end.
• Contribute to model‑system interfaces for agentic workflows.

You Might Thrive in This Role If You Have

• Experience building and scaling distributed systems.
• Background in search, retrieval, or indexing systems.
• Familiarity with embedding‑based or ML‑powered systems.
• Experience with performance optimization and production reliability.
• Ability to work across ML and systems boundaries.
• First‑principles thinking in ambiguous problem spaces.

About OpenAI

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.

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.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US‑based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non‑public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link .

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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.

Compensation

$380K – $555K + Offers Equity