Software Engineer, Search Infrastructure

OpenAI’s Search Product Infrastructure team is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design and run the systems that connect models with search across ChatGPT. This role focuses on search orchestration, inference efficiency, experimentation, and production reliability at scale.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve services that coordinate search classification, retrieval, ranking, and model inference, partnering with researchers and engineering teams to ship new capabilities.
• Improve end-to-end latency tradeoffs across search quality, reliability, and compute cost.
• Build experimentation tooling and automation for reproducible A/B tests, including success metrics and measurement of product impact. Use shadow traffic and load testing to validate system behavior, estimate capacity needs, and support safe production rollouts.
• Own production reliability through observability, resilient fallback behavior, incident response, and automation that improves launch safety and reduces operational toil.
• Develop search APIs and tool interfaces that help models and agents retrieve information reliably while respecting access controls and preserving source attribution.

Requirements

• Significant experience in designing for reliability or resource efficiency.
• Experience in one or more of search-related retrieval, ML infrastructure, inference serving, or other high-throughput online systems.
• Strong programming skills and systems debugging capability, with comfort working across languages and unfamiliar production components.
• Ability to translate ambiguous product or research needs into technical plans, align partners across teams, and deliver projects through deployment with measurable results.
• Enjoyment of learning across systems and ML, investigating unfamiliar problems, and communicating technical decisions and lessons clearly.

About the Team

The Search Product Infrastructure team builds the systems that power search experiences across ChatGPT. The team collaborates with groups that develop models, operate inference infrastructure, build specialized search experiences, and maintain search indexes. Work covers search orchestration, model serving, experimentation, and distributed systems, with direct impact on answer quality, responsiveness, reliability, and efficiency at ChatGPT scale.

About the Role

• Design, build, and operate systems that connect models with search at ChatGPT scale.
• Address challenges in search orchestration, inference efficiency, experimentation, and production reliability, making tradeoffs that influence answer quality and user experience.
• Work closely with researchers and partner engineering teams, owning projects from technical design through launch and iteration while evolving architecture as models, product capabilities, and demand grow.
• Location: San Francisco, CA, with a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week.
• Relocation assistance is available for eligible employees.

Compensation

USD 266,000 - 445,000 per year + offers equity. Base pay may vary based on individualized factors and eligible bonus(es), in addition to the benefits listed below. This role is at-will, and OpenAI may modify base pay and other compensation components based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.

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, plus multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year. 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.
• Daily meals in office 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.