Compensation
The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
- Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
- 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
- Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
- Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
- 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
- Mental health and wellness support
- Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
- Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
- Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
- Relocation support for eligible employees
- Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.
About the Team
The Scaling team designs, builds, and operates critical infrastructure that enables research at OpenAI.
About the Role
We're looking for an experienced Site Reliability Engineer to own production-critical infrastructure end to end.
This role is centered on data-heavy, low-latency workloads, with emphasis on operating large-scale ClickHouse clusters, high-throughput Kafka pipelines, and reliable integrations with Snowflake. You'll turn ambiguous operational problems into clear plans, ship pragmatic solutions quickly, and improve them through production feedback and iteration.
We are specifically looking for someone who can independently define and raise operational standards across teams while remaining deeply hands-on in production systems.
In this role, you will
- Own infrastructure lifecycle management across provisioning, upgrades, scaling, and decommissioning (IaC-first).
- Operate and scale ClickHouse clusters, including sharding, replication, capacity planning, performance tuning, and maintenance.
- Operate Kafka as the ingestion backbone, improving throughput, lag, backpressure handling, and failure recovery.
- Improve end-to-end latency and reliability for data-heavy serving and query workloads.
- Build and maintain strong monitoring and alerting: SLIs/SLOs, dashboards, alert policies, and actionable runbooks.
- Define, implement, and continuously improve incident response standards, on-call practices, and postmortem quality.
- Own backup/restore and disaster recovery strategy, including regular recovery drills.
- Plan and execute safe rollouts across multiple environments (dev/stage/prod), including canary and rollback strategies.
- Partner day to day with software engineers, embedding reliability into design, implementation, and release processes.
- Set the quality bar for operational readiness and runbook standards, and drive adoption across teams.
- Improve CI/CD pipelines and DevEx for faster, safer, and more predictable releases.
- Strengthen security posture across infrastructure and delivery systems (least privilege, secrets management, patching, supply-chain controls).
You might thrive in this role if you have
- A track record of owning production infrastructure for data-heavy, low-latency systems end to end.
- Strong hands-on experience operating ClickHouse, Kafka, and adjacent large-scale data systems.
- Practical experience with Snowflake workflows and cross-system data architecture.
- The ability to independently define operational standards (runbooks, incident process, rollout safety) and make them stick.
- Strong operational experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, and cloud infrastructure.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills; you work effectively across engineering and research teams.
- High personal rigor and organization in high-pressure production environments.
- A deeply hands-on mindset: willing to debug incidents, tune systems, and implement fixes directly.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.
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