Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Infrastructure engineering is a foundational function in SaaS, because product reliability and iteration speed depend on the quality of the underlying platform. This role sits squarely in that layer, focusing on cloud infrastructure, abstractions, and operating distributed systems at scale. The remit suggests a mature environment where platform choices materially shape how multiple product and engineering groups build and ship.
For a long-term SaaS career, the work maps to durable themes that recur across subscription businesses: keeping services available under load, improving operational hygiene, and designing interfaces that make other teams more productive. The mix of architecture and day-to-day ownership also builds the kind of judgment that becomes increasingly valuable in SaaS as systems grow in complexity and the cost of downtime rises.
This position will suit engineers who prefer working on enabling systems rather than end-user features, and who enjoy cross-team influence without losing hands-on depth. It is a strong match for professionals who like defining standards, making trade-offs between simplicity and resilience, and taking responsibility for production outcomes through on-call and incident response.
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 Role
We are seeking a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer to help design and evolve the platforms that power OpenAI’s products.
In this role, you will be a hands-on technical leader, driving the architecture, scalability, and reliability of critical infrastructure systems. You will help define how we build and operate infrastructure at the next order of magnitude, while influencing technical direction across teams.
This role is both deeply technical and highly strategic, requiring strong ownership, sound judgment, and the ability to partner effectively across engineering, product, and research organizations.
In this role, you will:
Design and build scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure platforms that power OpenAI products
Evolve cloud infrastructure abstractions that enable rapid product development across teams
Architect systems to support significant growth, performance, and operational complexity
Improve server orchestration, networking, and distributed systems reliability
Influence technical direction and infrastructure strategy across multiple teams
Partner closely with product, research, and engineering teams to align infrastructure with evolving needs
Own operational excellence, including participation in on-call rotations and incident response
Mentor engineers and raise the overall technical bar of the organization
Contribute to a culture of high ownership, low ego, and thoughtful collaboration
You might thrive in this role if you:
8+ years of experience building and operating large-scale infrastructure systems
Deep expertise in Kubernetes and container orchestration at scale
Strong experience designing cloud abstractions and platform infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure, or similar)
Proven track record of leading complex technical initiatives across teams
Experience operating highly reliable, secure, and scalable distributed systems
Strong systems thinking with the ability to balance velocity, reliability, and simplicity
Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
Experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction
Passion for building infrastructure that enables impactful products
Why This Role Matters
This role is critical to enabling OpenAI to scale its products and infrastructure to the next level. You will help define how we build and operate the systems that power some of the most widely used AI products in the world.
Your work will directly impact the reliability, scalability, and velocity of OpenAI’s technology—helping bring advanced AI capabilities to millions of users safely and effectively.
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.
