Data Scientist, Infrastructure

Department: Data Science

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $230K – $385K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

About the Team

Our infrastructure team helps deliver OpenAI’s most capable models and products to the world by scaling infrastructure and turning demand into useful FLOPS. We collaborate across research, engineering, design, and business to turn cutting-edge AI advancements into impactful, real-world applications. Our team ensures the right compute is available—at the right time and place—to support some of the world’s most demanding workloads. We empower all of OpenAI’s products and research by scaling the infrastructure behind them. Our work makes it possible to launch new models and products reliably and at scale.

About the Role

As a Data Scientist on the Infra team, you will play a key role in shaping how we scale the infrastructure that powers OpenAI’s products and research. This is critical as we operate one of the largest and most advanced compute fleets in the world, supporting millions of users and businesses globally. We focus on aligning infrastructure measurement, planning, scaling, allocation, and efficiency to drive measurable impact across the company.

You should expect to guide the definition of foundational datasets for infrastructure resources, develop metrics that inform key decisions, build forecasting and optimization models, and establish source of truth dashboards and analyses that enable teams to understand and improve infra usage. Most importantly, you should expect to be a core partner to engineering, research, and product teams in shaping the infrastructure that powers everything OpenAI builds.

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:

• Build and maintain foundational datasets and metrics that reflect infrastructure usage, efficiency, and scaling.

• Develop forecasting and optimization models to support infra planning and resource allocation.

• Partner with engineering, research, and product teams to shape infrastructure strategy through data.

• Drive clarity with source-of-truth dashboards and analyses that guide infra decisions across OpenAI.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 5+ years of experience in a quantitative role navigating ambiguous environments, ideally in infrastructure, systems, or platform domains at a high-growth company or research org

• Experience defining and operationalizing metrics that reflect system performance, resource usage, or efficiency from the ground up

• A strong foundation in SQL and Python, and a track record of building models and analyses that drive technical and strategic decisions

• Excellent communication skills and the ability to partner effectively with engineers, researchers, and product stakeholders

• A strategic mindset that goes beyond statistical testing to surface actionable insights and long-term tradeoffs

You could be an especially great fit if you have:

• Proven track record of operating as a data partner in large scale backend systems

• Comfortable navigating fast-paced execution while also anchoring decisions in long-term impact

• Strong programming background, with ability to run simulations and prototype variants

• Experience in NLP, large language models, or generative AI

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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