Software Engineer, Compute - Storage

ABOUT THE TEAM The Storage Infrastructure team builds and operates the storage foundation behind OpenAI’s most demanding workloads. We work directly with research to design storage systems for rapidly evolving experiments, while also powering production at scale. We own the platform end to end: backend systems, user-facing services and APIs, and the control planes that manage how data is placed, moved, and retained over time. Our stack spans cloud and in-house object stores across very different workload profiles, from GPU-attached systems to dedicated storage hardware. We also build the federation layer that unifies these backends behind a simple interface and routes each workload to the right storage solution. ABOUT THE ROLE You will help build the storage platform that powers OpenAI’s research and production systems. This is a hands-on infrastructure role for engineers who want to work on deeply technical systems at scale and own them in production. You’ll work across object storage, cross-region data movement, lifecycle management, and the federation layer that provides a unified interface across multiple backends. Much of our stack runs on Kubernetes, and we primarily build services in Rust. In this role, you will: - Build and operate storage services that underpin OpenAI’s research infrastructure - Develop object storage systems across cloud and in-house environments - Build systems for cross-region data movement, replication, and recovery - Design lifecycle management capabilities that keep data durable, available, and cost-effective - Evolve the federation layer that unifies multiple backend systems behind a simple interface - Improve performance, reliability, and operational excellence across the platform - Collaborate closely with researchers and infrastructure teams to support rapidly evolving workloads You might thrive in this role if you: - Have experience building or operating distributed systems in production - Have worked on storage infrastructure, object stores, distributed filesystems, or other data-intensive backend systems - Enjoy owning infrastructure end to end, including debugging and long-term reliability improvements - Write strong production code, ideally in Rust or another systems-oriented language - Are comfortable working with Kubernetes-based systems - Have experience with tools such as Terraform, Grafana, or similar infrastructure and observability tooling 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 the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional o