Software Engineer, System Enablement

Location San Francisco; Seattle Employment Type Full time Department Scaling Compensation $293K – $455K • Offers Equity The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits. Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit) 401(k) retirement plan with employer match Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks) Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law) Mental health and wellness support Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible Relocation support for eligible employees Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided. More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process. This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions. About the Team The Scaling team is responsible for the architectural and engineering backbone of OpenAI’s infrastructure. We design and deliver advanced systems that support the deployment and operation of cutting-edge AI models. Our work spans system software, networking, platform architecture, fleet-level monitoring, and performance optimization. About the Role We’re looking for an engineer who can take early, sometimes messy, pre-production hardware and make it “real”: bootstrapped, stable, imaged, joined to the right Kubernetes control plane, registered correctly, scheduled, and observable. You’ll sit at the intersection of early HW bring-up, provisioning automation, fleet/cluster management systems, and lab or cloud provider integration—turning new SKUs into capacity that is usable by internal customers. Key Responsibilities Own the end-to-end bring-up and bootstrap path for new systems and compute nodes from bare metal/early access in lab or production/cloud environments to schedulable fleet capacity: image build, user-data/config, cluster join, and readiness gates. Build and maintain “first-class” golden image + provisioning workflows across lab, and production environments, including working with partner-provided base images and reconciling OS/version requirements. Work with partner teams to integrate nodes into our fleet infrastructure and IaC pipelines (Terraform, Chef, etc.), ensuring cloud resources map cleanly onto our internal lifecycle expectations (e.g., VMSS/instance pools, image references). Partner with scheduling and platform owners to ensure new hardware is reachable and scheduled (pool definitions, network/WAN connectivity/routing, admission controls, platform-specific quirks), including cases where new SKUs require changes for scheduling integration. Drive registration and inventory correctness (e.g., systems that track nodes and their metadata), including hands‑on support to get nodes registered and visible end-to-end. Collaborate with partner teams to implement baseline health + telemetry bring-up: minimum viable health signals, pass/fail checks, and automated reporting suitable for early ramp decisions. Debug issues across layers: PXE/boot-loader, UEFI/BIOS, BMC, OS bring-up, NIC/network reachability, kubelet/control-plane connectivity, storage constraints, and early rack/lab realities. Qualifications BS in CS/EE (or equivalent practical experience). 5+ years of experience in systems SW development and building/operating Linux-based infrastructure in production or pre-production environments. Strong, hands‑on experience with: Kubernetes cluster operations (node lifecycle, bootstrap/join, debugging control-plane connectivity) Infrastructure-as-Code / config management (Terraform, Chef/Ansible, etc.) Provisioning and imaging (PXE/iPXE, golden images, cloud-init/user-data) Networking fundamentals (L2/L3, routing, DNS, firewalling; comfort debugging reachability) Proven ability to write automation in Python/Go/Bash and ship operational tooling/runbooks. Preferred Skills Experience bringing up new hardware platforms (early silicon/servers/NICs) in a lab setting and turning them into stable fleet capacity. Multi-cloud operational experience (Azure/GCP/AWS/OCI), especially with compute pools (e.g., VMSS / instance pools). Experience building telemetry/health pipelines (agent-based metrics/logging, health rollups, readiness criteria). Familiarity with WAN, peering, and multi-site network concepts for cluster deployments. 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. OpenAI’s Affiant Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link. OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy 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 Range: $293K - $455K #J-18808-Ljbffr