Software Engineer, Core Services · OpenAI

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 18:24:27 GMT
Engineering

OpenAI · San Francisco · $230K – $385K • Offers Equity · hybrid

Job Posting

Software Engineer, Core Services

Location

San Francisco

Employment Type

Full time

Department

Applied AI

Compensation

$230K – $385K • 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 Core Services team is responsible for building and managing foundational services. It acts as the bridge between core infrastructure (e.g. compute, storage, networking) and product engineering teams, and enables product teams to move fast, build reliably, and scale efficiently.

About the Role

As a software engineer in the core services team, you will design and operate critical backend platforms such as caching systems, workflow orchestration, metadata stores, and file services. You’ll focus on building highly reliable, scalable, and performant systems that serve as the backbone of our products.

We’re looking for people who are passionate about building infrastructure that empowers product teams, love working on distributed systems challenges, and enjoy creating well-designed APIs and abstractions that accelerate development.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

Design, build, and maintain shared infrastructure services such as caching layers, workflow orchestration (Temporal), metadata stores, and file storage services.

Collaborate with product teams to provide scalable, reliable primitives that abstract the complexities of distributed systems.

Improve performance, resilience, and scalability of core services that power customer-facing applications.

You might thrive in this role if you:

Have experience with distributed systems, caching infrastructure (e.g., Redis, Memcached), metadata storage (e.g., FoundationDB), or workflow orchestration (e.g., Temporal, Cadence).

Have experience running containerized services in cloud environments and integrating them into automated build/test/release (CI/CD) workflows.

Understand trade-offs in consistency models, replication strategies, and performance optimization in multi-region systems.

Excel at communication and collaboration with cross-functional teams, and are obsessed with delivering customer success.

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.