Software Engineer, Observability - job 1 of 2

Join the engineering teams that bring OpenAI’s ideas safely to the world!!

The Applied Engineering team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to consumers and businesses. We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth.

About the Role

As OpenAI continues to grow, we are looking for experienced, problem-solving engineers to ensure our systems scale. Our success depends on our ability to quickly iterate on products while also ensuring that they are performant and reliable.

You will work in a deeply iterative, collaborative, fast-paced environment to bring our technology to millions of users around the world, and ensure it’s delivered with safety and reliability in mind.

Successful candidates will play a crucial role in ensuring the observability, reliability, scalability, and performance of our systems as we continue to expand. As an observability expert, you will be at the forefront of maintaining and enhancing the stability, scalability, and performance of our rapidly evolving infrastructure. You will work closely with cross-functional teams, including software engineers, product managers, and data scientists, to build and maintain resilient systems that can handle our growing user base and workload. This role requires a blend of technical expertise, strategic thinking, and effective communication to ensure that systems are not only operational but also optimized and aligned with business goals.

In this role, you will:

• Develop and maintain systems that allow for effective monitoring, logging, and tracing of software applications. This includes choosing appropriate tools and technologies, setting up dashboards, and ensuring the scalability and reliability of the observability infrastructure.

• Develop and integrate tools for logging, monitoring, and alerting to enhance visibility into system performance. Ensure compatibility and efficiency across various platforms and services.

• Collaborate with different engineering teams to integrate observability practices into their workflows.

• Regularly analyze system performance and identify areas for improvement. This involves working closely with other engineering teams to understand their needs and challenges and providing insights and solutions for better system performance.

• Consistently stay up-to-date with the latest trends in observability, logging, monitoring, and cloud technologies. Introducing innovative solutions and best practices to improve system observability and reliability. Experiment with new tools and practices to enhance the observability landscape.

• Participate in strategic planning for the technology roadmap, including scalability, cost-effectiveness, and risk management considerations related to observability infrastructure.

• Create comprehensive documentation for observability systems and processes. Prepare reports and insights for management regarding system performance and reliability.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have a track record of building, operating and accelerating observability systems that empower your fellow engineers, at scale.

• Enjoy seeking out and addressing bottlenecks and areas for performance improvement in our systems.

• Utilize Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles to automate infrastructure provisioning and configuration management.

• Are experienced in collaborating with cross-functional teams to ensure that reliability and scalability are considered in the design and development of new features and services.

• Help create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture that makes all feel welcome while enabling radical candor and the challenging of group think.

• Have a humble attitude, an eagerness to help your colleagues, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed.

• Own problems end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field (or equivalent work experience).

• Proven proficiency in monitoring tools (e.g., DataDog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack) and cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP).

• Strong background in software engineering, with expertise in relevant programming languages (like Python, Java, Go) and cloud platforms (like AWS, GCP, Azure).

• Proficiency in programming/scripting languages.

• Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).

• Excellent communication skills are crucial for this role, as it involves interfacing with various stakeholders, presenting findings and plans, and documenting systems and processes.

• Experience with microservices architecture and service mesh technologies.

• Strong understanding of distributed systems, networking, and database technologies.

• Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to work in a fast-paced environment.

This role is exclusively based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.

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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 do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status. 

OpenAI Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement

For US Based Candidates: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.