Software Engineer, Productivity - Networking

ABOUT THE TEAM We’re hiring software engineers to make OpenAI’s networking teams more productive. These teams build and operate the high-performance networking systems that support OpenAI’s training and inference infrastructure at frontier scale. ABOUT THE ROLE We’re looking for someone who cares deeply about the developer experience of engineers working on complex infrastructure systems — especially around build systems, test architecture, release pipelines, and reliable development workflows. This role will be embedded with OpenAI’s networking team: making it faster, safer, and easier for engineers to build, test, validate, and ship changes across multi-server, networked, and hardware-adjacent environments. In this role you will: - Improve development workflows for engineers building and operating OpenAI’s networking systems - Design and improve continuous deployment, release, and validation pipelines - Build and maintain test harnesses for multi-server, networked, and hardware-backed environments - Improve iteration speed across C++, Python, and build-system-heavy codebases - Partner with engineers to identify friction in CI, testing, debugging, and deployment workflows - Drive testing and reliability strategy for infrastructure components that support large-scale training and inference workloads - Work closely with centralized developer experience teams while staying deeply embedded with the networking engineers closest to the systems You might thrive in this role if: - You are motivated by helping other engineers move faster and with more confidence - You have experience with CI/CD, release pipelines, testing infrastructure, or build systems - You are comfortable moving between C++, Python, and build systems such as CMake, Bazel, or Blaze - You enjoy building test harnesses, automation, and workflow improvements for complex systems - You do not need to be a networking expert, but you are excited to learn enough about the domain to make the team meaningfully more effective - When you see repeated friction — slow builds, flaky tests, brittle release processes, painful debugging, unclear validation — your instinct is to fix the underlying system - You are pragmatic and know how to balance high standards with forward progress - You like going end-to-end: understanding the engineers, the workflows, the codebase, and the operational realities behind the system - You are self-directed and comfortable operating with ambiguity in a high-context infrastructure environment About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with th