Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Reliability Software Engineer role stands out in SaaS because it sits at the point where product iteration meets production guarantees. OpenAI is described as continuing to grow and deploying AI systems to consumers and businesses, which makes reliability work central to how a high-demand, cloud-delivered product is operated. The emphasis on safety alongside performance signals an environment where operational rigor is treated as part of the product, not an afterthought.
For a long-term SaaS career, the role builds durable systems thinking around scale, automation, and measurable reliability. Work on SLOs and SLIs, chaos and synthetic testing, and infrastructure lifecycle management translates directly to modern SaaS operating models where uptime, latency, and cost efficiency are continuously traded off. Close collaboration with engineers, product managers, and data scientists also reflects how reliability practices are increasingly embedded into feature delivery rather than isolated in a separate ops function.
This position tends to fit engineers who prefer end-to-end ownership, from diagnosing bottlenecks to building tooling that changes how other teams ship and operate services. It also suits someone comfortable with structured incident response and on-call responsibilities, and who values clear operational metrics and infrastructure as code as everyday levers for improving customer-facing systems.
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
Join the engineering teams that bring OpenAI’s ideas safely to the world!!
The Applied Engineering team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to consumers and businesses. We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth.
About the Role
As OpenAI continues to grow, we are looking for experienced, problem-solving engineers to ensure our systems scale. Our success depends on our ability to quickly iterate on products while also ensuring that they are performant and reliable. You will work in a deeply iterative, collaborative, fast-paced environment to bring our technology to millions of users around the world, and ensure it’s delivered with safety and reliability in mind. Successful candidates will play a crucial role in ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of our systems as we continue to expand. As a reliability expert, you will be at the forefront of maintaining and enhancing the stability, scalability, and performance of our rapidly evolving infrastructure. You will work closely with cross-functional teams, including software engineers, product managers, and data scientists, to build and maintain resilient systems that can handle our growing user base and workload.
In this role, you will:
Design and implement solutions to ensure the scalability of our infrastructure to meet rapidly increasing demands.
Build and maintain the load, chaos and synthetic testing software leveraged by development teams to make the systems they design and operate more reliable.
Build and maintain automation tools to streamline repetitive tasks and improve system reliability.
Build and maintain the platform for CPU/storage, GPU, and network lifecycle management to drive efficiency, accountability and support dynamic optimization of our resources.
Implement fault-tolerant and resilient design patterns to minimize service disruptions.
Develop and maintain service level objectives (SLOs) and service level indicators (SLIs) to measure and ensure system reliability.
Partner with researchers, engineers, product managers, and designers to bring new features and research capabilities to the world.
Participate in an on-call rotation to respond to critical incidents and ensure 24/7 system availability.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have a track record of accelerating engineering reliability by empowering your fellow engineers with excellent tooling and systems.
Have a humble attitude, an eagerness to help your colleagues, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed.
Own problems end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done.
Enjoy seeking out and addressing bottlenecks and areas for performance improvement in our systems.
Utilize Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles to automate infrastructure provisioning and configuration management.
Are experienced in collaborating with cross-functional teams to ensure that reliability and scalability are considered in the design and development of new features and services.
Qualifications:
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field (or equivalent work experience).
Proven experience as an SWE focused on reliability or a similar role in a fast-paced, rapidly scaling company.
Strong proficiency in cloud infrastructure.
Proficiency in programming languages.
Experience with containerization technologies and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
Knowledge of IaC tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation.
Excellent problem-solving and troubleshooting skills.
Strong communication and collaboration skills.
Experience with observability tools such as DataDog, Prometheus, Grafana and Splunk.
Experience with microservices architecture and service mesh technologies.
Knowledge of security best practices in cloud environments.
This role is exclusively based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.
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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