Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure role sits in a part of the SaaS ecosystem where product capability is directly constrained by data throughput, governance, and reliability. The remit spans batch and streaming foundations, metadata and lakehouse patterns, and orchestration, which are the building blocks behind usage analytics, customer-facing data features, and ML-enabled functionality in modern SaaS platforms.
Career-wise, the work develops the kind of systems thinking that transfers across data-heavy SaaS companies: designing for scale, operating distributed platforms in production, and balancing performance with security and access controls. Full-lifecycle ownership, including production operations and incident response, builds practical judgment about failure modes and operational maturity that is difficult to gain in roles limited to feature delivery.
The position tends to suit engineers who enjoy platform work that serves many internal stakeholders and prefer measurable outcomes like latency, cost, and reliability. It is a strong match for professionals looking to deepen expertise in Spark and streaming ecosystems, infrastructure-as-code, and governed data access, while collaborating closely with product, analytics, and research partners in an environment where data systems are treated as core product infrastructure.
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
Data Platform at OpenAI owns the foundational data stack powering critical product, research, and analytics workflows. We operate some of the largest Spark compute fleets in production; design, and build data lakes and metadata systems on Iceberg and Delta with a vision toward exabyte-scale architecture; run high throughput streaming platforms on Kafka and Flink; provide orchestration with Airflow; and support ML feature engineering tooling such as Chronon. Our mission is to deliver reliable, secure, and efficient data access at scale and accelerate intelligent, AI assisted data workflows.
Join us to build and operate these core platforms that underpin OpenAI products, research, and analytics.
We’re not just scaling infrastructure – we’re redefining how people interact with data. Our vision includes intelligent interfaces and AI-assisted workflows that make working with data faster, more reliable, and more intuitive.
About the Role
This role focuses on building and operating data infrastructure that supports massive compute fleets and storage systems, designed for high performance and scalability. You’ll help design, build, and operate the next generation of data infrastructure at OpenAI. You will scale and harden big data compute and storage platforms, build and support high-throughput streaming systems, build and operate low latency data ingestions, enable secure and governed data access for ML and analytics, and design for reliability and performance at extreme scale.
You will take full lifecycle ownership: architecture, implementation, production operations, and on-call participation.
You’ve supported Spark, Kafka, Flink, Airflow, Trino, or Iceberg as platforms. You’re well-versed in infrastructure tooling like Terraform, experienced in debugging large-scale distributed systems, and excited about solving data infrastructure problems in the AI space.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role, you will:
Design, build, and maintain data infrastructure systems such as distributed compute, data orchestration, distributed storage, streaming infrastructure, machine learning infrastructure while ensuring scalability, reliability, and security
Ensure our data platform can scale by orders of magnitude while remaining reliable and efficient
Accelerate company productivity by empowering your fellow engineers & teammates with excellent data tooling and systems
Collaborate with product, research and analytics teams to build the technical foundations capabilities that unlock new features and experiences
Own the reliability of the systems you build, including participation in an on-call rotation for critical incidents
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have 4+ years in data infrastructure engineering OR
Have 4+ years in infrastructure engineering with a strong interest in data
Take pride in building and operating scalable, reliable, secure systems
Are comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change
Have an intrinsic desire to learn and fill in missing skills, and an equally strong talent for sharing learnings clearly and concisely with others
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.
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.
