Software Engineer, Search Infrastructure

OpenAI is hiring a senior Software Engineer for the Search Product Infrastructure team in San Francisco. In this hybrid role, you will design, build, and operate systems that connect models with search at ChatGPT scale, improving orchestration, inference efficiency, experimentation, and production reliability.

About the Team

The Search Product Infrastructure team creates the underlying systems that power search experiences across ChatGPT. The team collaborates with groups working on models, inference infrastructure, specialized search experiences, and search indexes to move advances in models and retrieval into production.

Work spans search orchestration, model serving, experimentation, and distributed systems, with measurable impact on answer quality, responsiveness, reliability, and efficiency at large scale.

About the Role

As a senior engineer on this team, you will own core systems that connect models with search at ChatGPT scale. You will address challenges in search orchestration, inference efficiency, experimentation, and production reliability, making engineering tradeoffs that influence answer quality and user experience.

You will partner with researchers and engineering teams, owning projects from technical design through launch and iteration. This includes evolving architecture as models, product capabilities, and demand grow.

Location: San Francisco, CA (hybrid, 3 days in the office per week). Relocation: relocation assistance for eligible employees.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve services that coordinate search classification, retrieval, ranking, and model inference, working with researchers and partner engineering teams to bring new capabilities into production.
• Improve end-to-end latency tradeoffs across search quality, reliability, and compute cost.
• Build experimentation tooling and automation for reproducible A/B tests, including defining success metrics and measuring product impact. Use shadow traffic and load testing to validate system behavior, estimate capacity needs, and support safe production rollouts.
• Drive 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 help models and agents retrieve information reliably while respecting access controls and preserving source attribution.

Requirements

• Significant experience designingance, reliability, or resource efficiency.
• Experience in one or more of searchation retrieval, ML infrastructure, inference serving, or other high-throughput online systems.
• Strong programming and systems debugging skills, with comfort working across languages and unfamiliar parts of a production stack.
• Ability to translate ambiguous product or research needs into clear technical plans, align partners across teams, and deliver measurable outcomes through deployment.
• Enjoyment of learning across systems and ML, investigating unfamiliar problems, and communicating technical decisions and lessons clearly.

Compensation

Base salary: USD 266,000 to 445,000 per year, plus offers equity.

OpenAI notes that base pay may vary based on individualized factors and performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees. The role is at-will, and OpenAI may modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.

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, 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
• Daily meals in 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