Data Infrastructure Engineer: OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity. The Data Platform team at OpenAI owns the foundational data stack that powers critical product, research, and analytics workflows. They operate some of the largest Spark compute fleets, design exabyte-scale data lakes, and run high-throughput streaming platforms to deliver reliable, secure, and efficient data access at scale.

About the Role:
This role focuses on designing, building, and operating the next generation of data infrastructure at OpenAI, supporting massive compute fleets and storage systems. The engineer will take full lifecycle ownership of systems, including architecture, implementation, production operations, and on-call participation. The ideal candidate has platform-level experience with technologies like Spark, Kafka, Flink, Airflow, or Iceberg.

Responsibilities:

Design, build, and maintain data infrastructure systems such as distributed compute, data orchestration, distributed storage, and streaming infrastructure.

Ensure the data platform can scale by orders of magnitude while remaining reliable and efficient.

Accelerate company productivity by empowering teammates with excellent data tooling and systems.

Collaborate with product, research, and analytics teams to build foundational technical capabilities.

Own the reliability of the systems you build, including participation in an on-call rotation.

Requirements:

4+ years in data infrastructure engineering OR 4+ years in infrastructure engineering with a strong interest in data.

A track record of building and operating scalable, reliable, and secure systems.

Comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change.

An intrinsic desire to learn and fill in missing skills and share learnings with others.

Well-versed in infrastructure tooling like Terraform.

Experienced in debugging large-scale distributed systems.