Senior Support Engineer - San Francisco

About the Position

Senior Support Engineer - San Francisco

Location

San Francisco, California, United States

Employment Type

Full time

Compensation

• $234K – $260K • Offers Equity

Responsibilities

• Be among the foremost technical and troubleshooting experts for our API platform at OpenAI. You are the last line of defense before the core Engineering team.
• Proactively identify and implement opportunities to scale support operations by leveraging automation and advancements in AI technologies. Contribute to shaping the future of technical support in an AI-driven era.
• Configure and use advanced monitoring and alerting workflows to proactively detect customer impacting issues in real time.
• In partnership with engineering, contribute to reliability reviews and preparedness for new features, launches, or strategic customer requirement updates. Ensure that operational readiness (monitoring, alerting, and fallback plans) is in place for any such changes.
• Design and refine incident response processes and documentation across strategic customers, engineering and support teams.
• Analyze operational metrics and incident RCAs to identify areas for improvement. Proactively recommend and implement enhancements to monitoring dashboards, alert configurations, and support workflows.
• Provide support coverage during holidays and weekends based on business needs.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field. A strong software engineering foundation is important for this role’s success.
• 8+ years of experience in technical operations roles such as SRE/NOC, designing monitoring systems and resolving production issues in fast-paced and mission-critical environments. A strong track record of troubleshooting complex technical problems at the systems level.
• Deep familiarity with modern monitoring, alerting, and observability practices. Hands-on experience setting up or managing metrics, logging, and tracing for distributed systems (e.g., understanding of SLIs/SLOs, alert tuning, dashboard creation).
• Proven experience leading incident response for high-severity outages or service disruptions. Able to perform real-time incident coordination, root cause analysis, and drive follow-ups (post-mortems, action items) to prevent recurrence. Knowledge of industry best practices for incident management and fault diagnosis.
• Strong skills in scripting or software engineering (e.g., Python or similar) to automate repetitive tasks and integrate tools.
• Solid understanding of cloud infrastructure and distributed systems fundamentals. Comfortable working with cloud services, load balancers, databases, and containerized applications.
• Effective at working cross-functionally in a high-trust environment. Strong communication skills to explain technical issues and resolutions to both engineering and non-technical stakeholders. You can coordinate efforts across teams and are comfortable providing updates in the midst of an ongoing incident.

We Offer

• 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.

About the Team

The Technical Support team is responsible for ensuring that developers and enterprises can reliably build mission critical solutions using OpenAI models. We provide technical guidance, resolve complex issues and support customers in maximizing value and adoption from deploying our highly-capable models. We work closely with Technical Success, Product, Engineering and others to deliver the best possible experience to our customers at scale. We think from an automation-first mindset and leverage the latest in AI to scale our support operations. Join the Senior Support Engineering (SSE) team at OpenAI and help shape the future of Technical Support in the age of AI.

About the Company

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.