Software Engineer, Observability

OpenAI·San Francisco·onsite
crypto:applicationengineeringIC4Applied AI
Compensation
$255k–$405k base / year (USD)
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 We’re building the observability product for OpenAI—from scalable infrastructure to a rich, AI-powered UI. Our systems ingest over petabytes of logs and billions of time series metrics across our fleet. We're now layering intelligence on top—think agents that summarize SEVs, auto-generate dashboards, or help engineers debug through notebook-like UIs. We’re hiring software engineers across the stack—infra, backend, and product. You’ll join a small, gritty team building both foundational infra and novel internal tools to make OpenAI's production systems reliable, performant, and observable. What You’ll Do - Own core observability infrastructure, including distributed logging, time series, and trace storage - Build AI-native tools that help engineers detect, understand, and resolve issues autonomously. - Contribute to UI experiences like dashboards, notebooking, or interactive debugging - Collaborate closely with engineers, researchers, user ops, and other teams across the company to build the next generation observability product You Might Be a Fit If You: - Have operated large-scale distributed systems in production. ( especially logging systems or some other time series databases) - Thrive in ambiguous environments and roll up your sleeves to solve unscoped problems. - Have full-stack chops or product sensibilities—you're excited to build real tools people use. - Have strong fundamentals in systems, networking, and cloud infra (Kubernetes, AWS, etc). - Bonus: built or contributed to observability systems (e.g. Prometheus, OpenTeleme