Software Engineer, Compute Foundations

OpenAI's Compute Foundations team builds software that manages GPU compute infrastructure across data centers and sites, supporting model training and inference. In this role, you will design and operate Kubernetes-based distributed systems that provision, configure, and manage compute resources throughout their lifecycle, connecting global services with bare-metal systems management.What You'll DoDesign, build, and operate Kubernetes-based controllers and distributed services that coordinate infrastructure across sites and scale as GPU capacity growsDefine APIs and resource models that enable clients to request and track lifecycle operations across diverse hardware platforms and providersBuild provisioning and configuration services that coordinate network boot, hardware management interfaces, firmware deployment, operating-system images, drivers, and host configurationDevelop lifecycle management systems for discovery, allocation, provisioning, upgrades, maintenance, recovery, and decommissioning, integrated with health and validation systemsDesign reliable reconciliation and recovery mechanisms for concurrent changes, interrupted operations, and partial failures with staged rollouts across nodes, racks, and clustersWhat You NeedStrong software engineering fundamentals with experience designing, implementing, and owning production distributed systems or infrastructure servicesExperience developing infrastructure systems that use Kubernetes APIs and reconciliation to manage resourcesUnderstanding of bare-metal node provisioning from power-on to configured workload-ready state, with depth in areas such as PXE, DHCP/DNS, baseboard management controllers (BMCs), firmware, Linux, drivers, images, or configuration managementAbility to design reliable APIs and asynchronous workflows, reasoning about concurrency, consistency, idempotency, and failures across service and provider boundariesCapability to diagnose reliability and performance problems across service, operating-system, and machine boundariesNice to HaveExperience building infrastructure control planes that coordinate operations across multiple sites or regionsPrior work with GPU or HPC infrastructure, including topology and shared dependencies across machines, racks, or clustersIntegration experience with multiple hardware platforms or infrastructure providers into a common service or resource model