Software Engineer, Platform Systems

About the role

The Platform Systems team at OpenAI operates at the intersection of cutting‑edge AI and large‑scale distributed systems. We build the engineering and research infrastructure required to train OpenAI’s flagship models on some of the world’s largest, custom‑built supercomputers.

Key responsibilities

• Design and build distributed failure detection, tracing, and profiling systems for large‑scale AI training jobs.
• Develop tooling to identify slow, faulty, or misbehaving nodes and provide actionable visibility into system behavior.
• Improve observability, reliability, and performance across OpenAI’s training platform.
• Debug and resolve issues in complex, high‑throughput distributed systems.
• Collaborate with systems, infrastructure, and research teams to evolve platform capabilities.
• Extend and adapt failure detection or tracing systems to support new training paradigms and workloads.

Required profile

• Care deeply about performance, stability, and observability in distributed systems.
• Enjoy finding and fixing issues in large‑scale systems and automating operational workflows.
• Have experience writing low‑level software where system details matter.
• Understand hardware, operating systems, networking, concurrency, and distributed systems.
• Background in high‑performance computing or low‑level systems engineering.
• Excited to work on critical infrastructure that powers frontier AI research.

Required skills

• Low‑level software development
• Hardware knowledge
• Operating systems
• Networking
• Concurrency
• Distributed systems
• High‑performance computing