Software Engineer (Infrastructure Economics)

Location: San Francisco, CA; on-site.

Salary: $385K–$445K base pay annually, plus equity, performance-related bonuses for eligible employees, and benefits.

Company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company building general-purpose artificial intelligence products and working to ensure AI benefits humanity.

What you will do

• Define the technical direction and roadmap for infrastructure cost and efficiency systems, leading projects from problem definition through production operation and adoption.
• Build billing, usage metering, and cost attribution systems connecting infrastructure spend to resources, workloads, services, and owning teams.
• Develop data pipelines and shared data models combining cloud billing, resource inventory, and utilization signals into dependable cost and capacity views.
• Build budgeting, forecasting, capacity-planning, APIs, reporting tools, and automated controls to support resource allocation and procurement decisions.
• Identify underutilized resources and waste, partner with engineering teams on measurable efficiency improvements, and preserve performance and reliability.
• Provide technical leadership across teams, mentor engineers, and own system correctness, scalability, and production behavior.

Requirements

• Over 7 years of experience designing, building, and operating production software and distributed systems, with technical ownership across multiple teams or a significant infrastructure domain.
• Experience building systems for infrastructure efficiency, cloud cost attribution, usage metering, budgeting, forecasting, or capacity management, with measurable outcomes.
• Hands-on ability across architecture, implementation, debugging, and operational improvements.
• Understanding of how compute, storage, and networking consumption translate into cost, including tradeoffs among utilization, performance, reliability, and growth.
• Ability to build trustworthy systems from complex billing and operational data, with strong attention to data correctness.
• Effective collaboration with engineering, finance, product, and leadership; ability to translate broad goals into plans and drive adoption without formal authority.
• Ability to own loosely defined problems, work autonomously, and make pragmatic decisions as requirements evolve.
• Experience building internal platforms that provide visibility into cloud spend, resource utilization, and ownership.
• Experience with batch or streaming data pipelines, financial data platforms, or large-scale analytics systems; Kubernetes, public cloud infrastructure, or resource management systems across cloud and on-premises environments.
• Experience automating resource allocation, cost allocation policies, budget tracking, or capacity forecasting.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time, on-site employment in San Francisco.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, employer HSA contributions, FSA options, commuter benefits, and a 401(k) with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, caregiver, sick, and safe leave, flexible PTO for exempt employees, and 13+ paid company holidays.
• Mental health and wellness support, employer-paid basic life and disability coverage, and an annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily office meals, eligible meal delivery credits, relocation support for eligible employees, charitable donation matching, and wellness stipends.
• The role is at-will; compensation components may be modified based on performance, team or company results, or market conditions.