Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Software Engineer, Real Time role sits at a modern SaaS inflection point: delivering real time experiences on top of API driven platforms used by other software businesses. Work that blends RTC reliability with large scale infrastructure is increasingly central to SaaS products that embed voice, video, and live collaboration, and the listing signals production grade expectations across Kubernetes, streaming, and data systems.
From a SaaS career perspective, the role builds durable leverage in two directions. On one side, it deepens platform engineering judgment around latency, observability, and incident response for globally deployed services. On the other, it connects that infrastructure work to product outcomes through cross functional collaboration, a common pattern in SaaS teams where iteration speed and operational correctness both matter. Experience here tends to translate well to any company operating multi tenant, always on services.
This is best suited to engineers who like owning problems end to end and are comfortable moving between application code and underlying systems. It fits someone who enjoys real time constraints, pragmatic tradeoffs, and the responsibility that comes with on call for customer facing capabilities, while still valuing thoughtful engineering and user experience.
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
We bring OpenAI's technology to the world through products like ChatGPT and the OpenAI API. Our customers build fast-growing businesses around our APIs, which power products that were never before possible. We simultaneously ensure that our powerful tools are used responsibly. Safe deployment is more important to us than unfettered growth.
The Engineering team manages a massive fleet of GPUs with scalable, robust infrastructure powered by Kubernetes, Go, Python, Terraform, Kafka, Postgres, and Snowflake.
About the Role
We’re looking for experienced and creative engineers to help us scale our existing systems and build the next-generation system to enable a whole new class of products. We are seeking an engineer who is comfortable with full-stack development and has experience with Real-Time Communication (RTC). Candidates should have experience with scaled real-time communication systems in production.
Responsibilities
Design and build development and production platforms that power our systems.
Partner with researchers, engineers, product managers, and designers to bring new features and research capabilities to the world.
Accelerate engineering productivity by empowering your fellow engineers with excellent tooling and systems.
Build and provide operational support for globally deployed systems, powering some of the most advanced products in the market. This includes participating in an on-call rotation to respond to critical incidents as needed.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have significant experience building (and rebuilding) production systems to deliver new product capabilities and handle increasing scale.
Have experience with real-time communication products and systems, including audio and video calling, WebRTC or competing protocols, encoding/decoding, signaling, lip sync, etc.
Care deeply about user experience and take pride in building products that solve customer needs.
Have a humble attitude, eagerness to help colleagues, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed.
Own problems end-to-end and are willing to pick up any necessary knowledge to get the job done.
Have been a startup founder or an early-stage engineer.
Experience in Machine Learning techniques is a plus but not required.
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.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy
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.
