Software Engineer, Compute - Storage

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