About the Position

Software Engineer, Search Infrastructure

San Francisco

About the Team

The Search Product Infrastructure team builds the systems that power search experiences across our platform. We partner with teams developing models, operating inference infrastructure, building specialized search experiences, and maintaining search indexes to bring advances in models and retrieval into production. Our work spans search orchestration, model serving, experimentation, and distributed systems, with direct impact on answer quality, responsiveness, reliability, and efficiency at our scale.

About the Role

As a senior engineer on the Search Product Infrastructure team, you will design, build, and operate the systems that connect models with search at our scale. You will tackle challenges in search orchestration, inference efficiency, experimentation, and production reliability, making tradeoffs that directly shape answer quality and user experience. Working closely with researchers and partner engineering teams, you will own projects from technical design through launch and iteration, evolving the architecture as models, product capabilities, and demand grow.

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.

Responsibilities

Design and evolve the services that coordinate search classification, retrieval, ranking, and model inference, working closely with researchers and partner engineering teams to bring new capabilities into production.
Improve end-to-end latency, throughput, and infrastructure efficiency through profiling, caching, request routing, and capacity planning, making informed tradeoffs between search quality, reliability, and compute cost.
Build experimentation tooling and automation to run reproducible A/B tests, define success metrics, and measure product impact. Use shadow traffic and load testing to validate system behavior, estimate capacity needs, and support safe production rollouts.
Own production reliability through observability, resilient fallback behavior, incident response, and automation that improves launch safety and reduces operational toil.
Build search APIs and tool interfaces that enable models and agents to retrieve information reliably while respecting access controls and preserving source attribution.

Requirements

Significant experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, with depth in performance, reliability, or resource efficiency.
Experience in one or more of search, information retrieval, ML infrastructure, inference serving, or other high-throughput online systems.
Strong programming and systems debugging skills, and comfort working across languages and unfamiliar parts of a production stack.
Ability to turn ambiguous product or research needs into clear technical plans, align partners across teams, and carry projects through deployment and measurable results.
Enjoy learning across systems and ML, investigating unfamiliar problems, and sharing technical decisions and lessons clearly with others.

About the Company

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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

We Offer

Competitive salary
Relocation assistance
Hybrid work model (3 days in the office per week)
Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI technologies
Collaborative and innovative work environment

Join us in shaping the future of technology.

Software Engineer, Search Infrastructure

Job description