Software Engineer, Traffic (Cloud Networking)

Location: On-site in San Francisco, CA or Seattle, WA

Salary: $266K–$445K base pay, plus equity, performance-related bonuses, and benefits

Company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company building general-purpose AI products including ChatGPT and the API.

What you will do

• Design, build, and operate ingress, egress, and service-to-service connectivity across clusters, regions, and clouds.
• Develop proxies, gateways, controllers, and automation for routing, load balancing, failover, and traffic management.
• Build cloud networking infrastructure covering private connectivity, NAT, and network isolation.
• Diagnose failures and performance bottlenecks across application, proxy, transport, and cloud networking layers, collaborating with cloud providers when needed.
• Build telemetry and diagnostic tools, improve latency, throughput, availability, and network efficiency, and conduct careful production rollouts.
• Partner with Security on secure service communication, access controls, egress restrictions, DDoS defenses, safe defaults, on-call operations, and reducing recurring manual work.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience building production infrastructure or distributed systems, including substantial networking or traffic infrastructure experience.
• Depth in one or more of cloud networking, Kubernetes networking, proxies and gateways, service meshes, load balancing, or global traffic routing.
• Understanding of IP routing, TCP/UDP, DNS, NAT, TLS, and HTTP/gRPC and their effects on connectivity and performance.
• Hands-on experience with Envoy, NGINX, Istio, Cilium, or comparable networking infrastructure.
• Production software development in Go, Rust, C++, Python, or a similar language, using software and automation to solve operational problems.
• Ability to investigate unfamiliar failures using evidence, test hypotheses, and verify resolutions.
• Ownership of design, implementation, rollout, and ongoing reliability, with clear cross-team communication.
• Commitment to making infrastructure secure and understandable for dependent engineers.

Culture & Benefits

• On-site work in San Francisco or Seattle with production ownership and participation in on-call.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• 401(k) with employer match, paid parental, medical, caregiver, sick, and safe leave, paid holidays, and paid time off.
• Mental health and wellness support, life and disability coverage, and commuter benefits.
• Annual learning and development stipend, daily office meals, eligible meal delivery credits, and relocation support for eligible employees.
• Equity and performance-related bonuses may be provided in addition to base pay.

Hiring process

• Background checks apply in accordance with applicable law, including relevant fair-chance requirements for US-based candidates.
• Reasonable accommodations are available for applicants with disabilities.