Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Developer productivity work is a foundational layer in modern SaaS, where iteration speed and reliability directly influence how quickly products can ship and how safely they can evolve. This role sits close to the internal platform that enables research and engineering to build, test, and deploy continuously, which is increasingly critical as SaaS organizations add more contributors and more complex codebases.
For a SaaS career, the long-term value comes from learning how delivery systems scale: CI design, test strategy, build tooling, and the metrics that make engineering throughput observable. Experience improving the developer experience across Python, Rust, and C++ environments also transfers well to other SaaS companies running mixed stacks, monorepos, and containerized infrastructure, where internal tooling becomes a force multiplier.
This position tends to suit engineers who prefer leverage over feature ownership and who like turning ambiguous friction into repeatable workflows. It aligns with professionals who enjoy cross-team collaboration, balancing pragmatism with systems thinking, and treating reliability and velocity as measurable engineering outcomes rather than abstract goals.
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 Fleet team builds core components to enable productive research from small to state of the art scale across OpenAI, with the goal of accelerating progress towards AGI. We frequently collaborate with other teams to speed up the development of new state-of-the-art capabilities.
About the Role
As we scale up with more researchers and engineers joining OpenAI, we seek a pragmatic and passionate engineer with a strong focus on the development experience for both engineers and scientists.
In this role, you will be responsible for building and maintaining systems that allow our research + engineering organization to iteratively develop, test, and deploy new features reliably, with high velocity, and with a frictionless and fast development cycle.
You will help oversee and drive to the vision of how we should build, test and deploy software. You will drive the design of our continuous integration pipelines, testing infrastructure, training and support around our build system. Our current environment relies heavily on Python, Rust, and C++, which you will take ownership of and strive to transform into a state of the art development experience for research.
Ultimately, your role will be to provide the necessary tools and metrics to support our fast-paced culture and ensure a stable, scalable platform for growth, while also fostering a seamless and low friction experience for OpenAI’s research.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. For a San Francisco role, we use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have supported large monorepo development and deployment before
Are a proficient Python programmer working in large monorepos
Are proficient with Docker and Kubernetes
Experienced in CI/CD
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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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.
