Software Engineer, Search Infrastructure

Applied AI Engineering - San Francisco

About the Team

The Search Product Infrastructure team builds the systems that power search experiences across ChatGPT. We partner with teams developing models, operating inference infrastructure, building specialized search experiences, and maintaining search indexes to bring advances in models and retrieval into production. Our work spans search orchestration, model serving, experimentation, and distributed systems, with direct impact on answer quality, responsiveness, reliability, and efficiency at ChatGPT scale.

About the Role

As a senior engineer on the Search Product Infrastructure team, you will design, build, and operate the systems that connect models with search at ChatGPT scale. You will tackle challenges in search orchestration, inference efficiency, experimentation, and production reliability, making tradeoffs that directly shape answer quality and user experience. Working closely with researchers and partner engineering teams, you will own projects from technical design through launch and iteration, evolving the architecture as models, product capabilities, and demand grow.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Design and evolve the services that coordinate search classification, retrieval, ranking, and model inference, working closely with researchers and partner engineering teams to bring new capabilities into production.
• Improve end-to-end latencyed tradeoffs between search quality, reliability, and compute cost.
• 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 that improves launch safety and reduces operational toil.
• Build search APIs and tool interfaces that enable models and agents to retrieve information reliably while respecting access controls and preserving source attribution.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have significant experience designingance, reliability, or resource efficiency.
• Bring experience in one or more of searchation retrieval, ML infrastructure, inference serving, or other high-throughput online systems.
• Have strong programming and systems debugging skills, and are comfortable working across languages and unfamiliar parts of a production stack.
• Can turn ambiguous product or research needs into clear technical plans, align partners across teams, and carry projects through deployment and measurable results.
• Enjoy learning across systems and ML, investigating unfamiliar problems, and sharing technical decisions and lessons clearly with others.

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 the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employeration, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable lawation technology systems and related data security obligations.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

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.

Compensation

$266K – $445K + Offers Equity

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factorsance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
• 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
• Mental health and wellness support
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
• Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.

This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.