Software Engineer, Search Infrastructure

The Search Product Infrastructure team builds the systems that power search experiences across ChatGPT, partnering with teams developing models, operating inference infrastructure, building specialized search experiences, and maintaining search indexes. The senior engineer in this role will design, build, and operate the systems that connect models with search at ChatGPT scale, owning projects from technical design through launch and iteration. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, with a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company and an equal opportunity employer.

Responsibilities

Design and evolve the services that coordinate search classification, retrieval, ranking, and model inference; Improve end-to-end latency, throughput, and infrastructure efficiency through profiling, caching, request routing, and capacity planning; Build experimentation tooling and automation to run reproducible A/B tests, define success metrics, and measure product impact; Use shadow traffic and load testing to validate system behavior, estimate capacity needs, and support safe production rollouts; Own production reliability through observability, resilient fallback behavior, incident response, and automation; Build search APIs and tool interfaces that enable models and agents to retrieve information reliably while respecting access controls and preserving source attribution

Requirements

Significant experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, with depth in performance, reliability, or resource efficiency; Experience in one or more of search, information retrieval, ML infrastructure, inference serving, or other high-throughput online systems; Strong programming and systems debugging skills, and comfort working across languages and unfamiliar parts of a production stack; Ability to turn ambiguous product or research needs into clear technical plans, align partners across teams, and carry projects through deployment and measurable results; Enjoyment of learning across systems and ML, investigating unfamiliar problems, and sharing technical decisions and lessons clearly with others

Benefits

Relocation assistance for new employees