Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Core Services work sits at the heart of any SaaS platform, because reliability, storage, orchestration, and runtime foundations determine what product teams can safely ship. This Engineering Manager role is notable for its focus on production service building blocks rather than developer tooling or data infrastructure, a scope that tends to define the operational baseline for multiple customer-facing products. In a SaaS context, that positioning makes the work closely tied to availability, latency, and safe rollout practices that directly influence end-user experience.
From a career standpoint, leading teams responsible for distributed systems on the critical path builds durable SaaS leadership skills: setting technical direction under real operational constraints, aligning SLOs with product priorities, and maturing incident response and capacity planning as usage grows. The cross-functional partnering described also mirrors how SaaS organizations scale, where platform decisions must balance reliability, velocity, and cost.
This role fits managers who remain technically deep and prefer owning platform outcomes end to end, from architecture through operations. It will suit someone comfortable coordinating across product and infrastructure stakeholders, and who enjoys developing engineers while also driving platform initiatives that other teams depend on.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the Team
The Core Services organization builds and runs the mission-critical online services that product teams rely on in production. We own foundational distributed systems and platform capabilities that enable reliable execution, high-performance services, and large-scale file/data needs across our products. This team is distinct from developer infrastructure and data infrastructure—our focus is production service foundations and core runtime services.
About the Role
We’re hiring an Engineering Manager, Core Services to help lead teams responsible for highly reliable, high-scale distributed systems that sit on the critical path for OpenAI products. Your team will own foundational production systems that OpenAI’s product engineering teams build on. You’ll collaborate closely with product and infrastructure partners to ship reliable services quickly, and help scale systems and teams as OpenAI grows. You’ll partner closely with senior engineering leaders to scale the org, mature operations, and drive major platform initiatives. This role requires strong technical ability.
You’ll be responsible for:
Managing and growing a high-performing, team of infrastructure engineers.
Leading teams building and operating large, critical production platforms, including cluster reliability, scaling, and rollout safety.
Building and operating mission-critical distributed systems with strong operational rigor (SLOs, incident response, capacity planning, reliability).
Setting technical direction for platform foundations such as workflow/orchestration capabilities, large-scale file/blob/storage services, and core service foundations.
Partnering with a broad set of stakeholders, including product engineering, adjacent infrastructure teams, and (where relevant) finance/cost partners.
Coaching, mentoring, and developing engineers and emerging leaders.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have significant experience leading teams that run mission-critical infrastructure in production.
Have experience operating mission-critical services, or core distributed systems building blocks.
Have built platform-like systems (e.g., orchestration/workflow execution, service platforms) and/or large-scale storage/blob/file infrastructure.
Have experience building systems spanning multiple cloud environments.
Take pride in building scalable, reliable systems and improving operational health.
Own problems end-to-end and can move fast in environments with ambiguity and competing priorities.
Workplace & Location
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.
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 offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
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