Software Engineer, Fleet Hardware Health

About the team

The Fleet team at OpenAI supports the computing environment that powers our cutting-edge research and product development. We oversee large-scale systems that span data centers, GPUs, networking, and more, ensuring high availability, performance, and efficiency. Our work enables OpenAI’s models to operate seamlessly at scale, supporting both internal research and external products like ChatGPT. We prioritize safety, reliability, and responsible AI deployment over unchecked growth.

About the role

As a software engineer on the Fleet Hardware team, you will be responsible for the reliability and uptime of all of OpenAI’s compute fleet.  Minimizing hardware failure is key to research training progress and stable services, as even a single hardware hiccup can cause significant disruptions. With increasingly large supercomputers, the stakes continue to rise.

Being at the forefront of technology means that we are often the pioneers in troubleshooting these state-of-the-art systems at scale. This is a unique opportunity to work with cutting-edge technologies and devise innovative solutions to maintain the health and efficiency of our supercomputing infrastructure.

Our team empowers strong engineers with a high degree of autonomy and ownership, as well as ability to effect change. This role will require a keen focus on system-level comprehensive investigations and the development of automated solutions. We want people who go deep on problems, investigate as thoroughly as possible, and build automation for detection and remediation at scale.

In this role, you will:

• Build and maintain automation systems for provisioning and managing server fleets.

• Develop tools to monitor server health, performance, and lifecycle events.

• Collaborate with clusters, networking, and infrastructure teams.

• Partner with external operators to ensure a high level of quality.

• Identify and fix performance bottlenecks and inefficiencies.

• Continuously improve automation to reduce manual work.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• Experience managing large-scale server environments.

• A balance of strengths in building and operationalizing.

• Proficiency in Python, Go, or similar languages.

• Strong Linux, networking, and server hardware knowledge.

• Comfort digging into noisy data with SQL, PromQL, and Pandas or any other tool.

Prior hardware expertise is not required for this role.

Bonus Skills:

• Experience with low level details of hardware components, protocols, and associated Linux tooling (e.g., PCIe, Infiniband, networking, power management, kernel perf tuning)

• Knowledge of hardware management protocols (e.g., IPMI, Redfish).

• High-performance computing (HPC) or distributed systems experience.

• Prior experience developing, managing, or designing hardware.

• Familiarity with monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana).

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 do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status. 

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For US Based Candidates: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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.