Software Engineer, Agent Infrastructure

About the Team

The Agent Infrastructure team at OpenAI is responsible for building systems that enable training and deployment of highly useful AI agents, both internally and for the world.

We work hand-in-hand with researchers to design and scale the environment in which agentic models are trained – providing a workspace for AI models to execute code, debug issues, and develop software just as human SWEs do. Our training environment for agentic models operates at an extremely high scale and has the flexibility to emulate any environment in which an agent might work.

At the same time, our team builds and maintains OpenAI’s core platform for the deployment and execution of agents in production. Our systems power products such as Codex, Operator, tool use in ChatGPT, and future agentic products. 

Some of the most challenging technical problems in scaling the capabilities and utility of agents and agentic models lie in the infrastructure layer – and our team is focused on building the research and production systems that enable OpenAI to train the most capable models in the world, and maximize the utility of our agentic products for users around the world.

About the Role

As a Software Engineer on the Agent Infrastructure team, you will have the opportunity to work closely with both research and product at OpenAI - building and scaling systems to train highly capable agentic models, and building the platform and integrations to launch new agents to hundreds of millions of users worldwide.

Your work will consist of both building new capabilities - standing up the infrastructure and integrations needed to train more complex agentic models - and rapidly scaling these new capabilities to some of the largest compute clusters in the world. At the same time, you’ll be instrumental to the launch of agentic products at OpenAI - building, maintaining, and scaling the production platform on which all agents run.

We’re looking for people with deep experience building AI infrastructure and who are used to working closely with researchers to build high-performance systems at massive scale for novel use cases.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA or New York City, NY. 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:

• Push massive compute clusters to their limits. You will be a core contributor to a novel container orchestration platform built in-house by our team to scale far beyond what’s possible with systems like Kubernetes.

• Develop and maintain FastAPI and gRPC APIs that serve as the interface for our agentic infrastructure used both in training and production.

• Use Terraform to stand up and evolve complex infrastructure for both research and production.

• Collaborate with research teams to stand up and optimize systems for novel AI training runs and experimental applications.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have deep experience working on large-scale machine learning infrastructure. You know how to reason about training at scale, identifying bottlenecks and engineering solutions to optimize system performance in training environments.

• Know how to build new things from 0-1 quickly, and then scale them 1,000,000x.

• Have a keen eye for performance and optimization. You know how to squeeze the most performance out of complex, globally-distributed systems.

• Know your way around cloud platforms and work with infrastructure-as-code tech like Terraform.

• Are driven by solving complex, ambiguous problems at the intersection of infrastructure scalability, virtualization efficiency, and agentic capabilities.

• Have deep technical expertise in virtualization and containerization technologies (e.g. Kata, Firecracker, gVisor, Sysbox) and are passionate about optimizing runtime performance.

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.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

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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