Software Engineer, Traffic Infrastructure

Scaling - San Francisco

About the Team

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The Cloud Infrastructure team builds and operates the infrastructure behind OpenAI’s products, including ChatGPT and the API. Within Cloud Infrastructure, the Traffic team owns how traffic enters our cloud environments, moves between services, clusters, and regions, and reaches external dependencies.

Our work spans cloud networking, Kubernetes networking, ingress and egress gateways, proxies, load balancing, and traffic steering. We build the systems, controls, and observability that make these paths reliable, secure, efficient, and straightforward for other engineering teams to use.

About the Role

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You’ll build and operate the networking and traffic infrastructure that connects OpenAI’s products and services across clouds and regions. The team’s work spans L3, L4, and L7—from IP connectivity, NAT, and transport behavior to service proxies and application request routing.

You’ll bring depth in part of this stack and curiosity about how the whole path works. Projects may include building gateways and control planes, improving cross-region connectivity, diagnosing packet loss or connection exhaustion, and making routing changes safer and easier to operate.

This role combines software engineering with production ownership. You’ll turn ambiguous networking problems into durable improvements, working closely with service owners, infrastructure teams, Security, and cloud providers.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA or Seattle, WA.

In this role, you will:

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• Design, build, and operate ingress, egress, and service-to-service connectivity across clusters, regions, and clouds.
• Develop proxies, gateways, controllers, and automation for routing, load balancing, failover, and traffic management.
• Build and evolve cloud networking infrastructure, including private connectivity, NAT, and network isolation.
• Diagnose failures and performance bottlenecks across application, proxy, transport, and cloud networking layers; work with cloud providers when issues extend into their infrastructure.
• Build telemetry and diagnostic tools that explain traffic paths, identify failing components, and help engineers take effective action.
• Partner with Security to implement and validate traffic-path protections, including secure service communication, access controls, egress restrictions, and DDoS defenses.
• Improve latency, throughput, availability, and network efficiency through measurement, testing, and careful production rollouts.
• Create clear interfaces and safe defaults for service teams, participate in on-call, and turn operational lessons into changes that prevent recurring failures and reduce manual work.

You might thrive in this role if you:

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• Have 5+ years of experience building production infrastructure or distributed systems, including substantial work on networking or traffic infrastructure.
• Have depth in one or more areas such as cloud networking, Kubernetes networking, proxies and gateways, service meshes, load balancing, or global traffic routing.
• Understand networking fundamentals and can reason about how IP routingance.
• Have hands-on experience building or operating systems such as Envoy, NGINX, Istio, Cilium, or comparable networking infrastructure.
• Write production software in Go, Rust, C++, Python, or a similar language, and use software and automation to solve operational problems.
• Can investigate unfamiliar failures using evidence, test hypotheses, and follow problems through to a verified resolution.
• Take ownership of design, implementation, rollout, and ongoing reliability, and communicate clearly across teams when a problem crosses ownership boundaries.
• Care about making infrastructure secure and understandable for the engineers who depend on it.

We value deep expertise and the willingness to learn across boundaries. You do not need prior experience with every technology or networking layer listed above.

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 the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employeration, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable lawation technology systems and related data security obligations.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

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

$266K – $445K + Offers Equity

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factorsance-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.