Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Software Engineer role sits in a part of the SaaS ecosystem that often determines how quickly product capabilities can be shipped: internal developer productivity. By focusing on training and inference runtimes and the workflows around them, the work maps to the platform layer that supports AI-powered products, where reliability and iteration speed directly influence what end users ultimately experience.
From a SaaS career perspective, the role builds durable leverage skills rather than narrow feature delivery. Improving CI, testing strategy, and end-to-end developer experience develops fluency in operational excellence, tooling, and cross-team enablement, all of which transfer across SaaS companies that rely on complex infrastructure. Work that reduces friction for other engineers also tends to sharpen judgment on prioritization, tradeoffs, and how to measure impact in engineering systems.
This position is best suited to engineers who enjoy being close to how teams build, not only what they build. It favors a working style that notices recurring pain points, collaborates across multiple groups, and follows through on incremental improvements. It can also fit someone who values pragmatic problem selection and wants to deepen Python-centric systems experience in a production research-to-deployment environment.
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’re hiring software engineers to make the Workload team more productive. The Workload team maintains the core components of OpenAI’s training and inference frameworks and helps execute frontier experiments.
About the Role
We’re looking for someone who cares about the developer experience of working in and around OpenAI’s core training and inference frameworks.
In this role you will:
Be responsible for optimizing the development workflows of the engineers around you
Work within various Workload teams to address their specific needs, but collaborate with the centralized teams that own various aspects of development experience
Optimize iteration speed, both broadly, and in particular by optimizing specific teams’ CI
Improve reliability, for instance, by driving testing strategy for particular components
Work through the long tail of things that it takes to build libraries and systems that will delight researchers
You might thrive in this role if:
You are motivated by helping people. You believe a thing that separates great teams from good teams are the players willing to do whatever work it takes, without ego.
You believe in the power of developer experience. Something magical happens when people can quickly and confidently iterate on a simple codebase, but this magic is fragile and must be fought for.
When you see someone trip over something, no matter how small, your first instinct is asking yourself what it would take for that to not happen again. Your second instinct is clicking merge on the PR you’ve already written to make it so.
You are pragmatic. You have the ability to see the world through a perfectionist’s eyes, but are not yourself a perfectionist. You know which problems to pick and when to switch to making progress on a different problem.
You like going end-to-end on things. You love co-design — that feeling when you were only able to find the right solution because you both deeply understand the users that interact with a system and the system itself.
You like working with Python
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.
