Engineering Manager, Infrastructure (San Francisco)

About the Team:

The Cloud Infrastructure Automation team designs, builds, and operates the systems that power OpenAI's global AI platforms. We manage Kubernetes clusters at massive scale, global networking and load balancing, service mesh deployments, and infrastructure automation that keeps our services fast, reliable, and secure.

Our mission is to enable OpenAI to deliver products like ChatGPT, DALL*E, and our APIs (GPT-5, GPT-4o, embeddings, fine-tuning) to millions of developers and users worldwide - safely, efficiently, and at scale.

We're seeking an experienced and forward-thinking engineering leader to scale our Cloud Infrastructure Automation function. You'll be responsible for Kubernetes operations at global scale, high-performance networking, global load balancing, and the automation systems that tie it all together

In this role, you will:

• Be hands-on in shaping technical direction, team structure, and execution:

  • Build and lead a high-performing, diverse engineering team (including ICs and managers) focused on automation, Kubernetes, networking, and global traffic routing.

  • Set and own core infrastructure KPIs/SLOs (availability, latency, scalability) and continuously improve them.

  • Architect and scale multi-region Kubernetes clusters, global load balancing, and service mesh deployments.

  • Automate everything - from provisioning to upgrades to failover - using Terraform, CI/CD, and custom tooling.

  • Strengthen reliability and security , including network hardening, traffic shaping, and proactive incident prevention.

  • Partner with research and product teams to streamline the interface between experimental workloads and production deployments.

  • Coach and grow engineers and managers, fostering technical excellence and leadership depth.

  • Champion a healthy culture of inclusion, transparency, and high-trust collaboration.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 5+ years in engineering leadership , including managing managers and distributed teams.

• Bring deep experience in Kubernetes at scale , networking (L4/L7), service mesh (e.g., Istio, Envoy), and cloud-native automation.

• Have designed and operated global load balancing and traffic routing at internet scale.

• Are fluent in infrastructure-as-code, modern CI/CD, and large-scale system observability.

• Can dive deep technically while also operating at the strategic, organizational level.

• Have a track record of recruiting and retaining top engineering talent in a competitive market.

• Excel in environments with high ambiguity and rapid change, bringing clarity and execution focus.

Care deeply about security, reliability, and operational excellence as first-class priorities.

Technical Environment

Our stack includes:

• Kubernetes across dozens of clusters and multiple regions

• Service mesh (Istio, Envoy) for secure, observable, and resilient traffic routing

• Global networking & load balancing via Cloudflare and cloud provider primitives

• Infrastructure automation using Terraform and internal tooling

• Observability pipelines with Prometheus, Grafana, and distributed tracing

• Datastores including Postgres, Cosmos DB, and Kafka

Location:

This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

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 .

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

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.

Compensation Range: $325K - $405K

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