Software Engineer, Backend

About the Team

The Sora team is working on making video a key capability of OpenAI’s foundation models. We are a hybrid research and product team that seeks to understand and expand the capabilities of our video models, while ensuring their reliability and safety. We accomplish this both through directly studying and experimenting with the models, as well as deploying them into the real-world to distribute their benefits widely.

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced engineer to help build OpenAI’s video infrastructure for ingesting, processing, and serving video at scale. You’ll work closely with product engineers and researchers to understand current needs, and architect systems that help accelerate these efforts.

As we are in the nascent stages of working with video at OpenAI, we will rely on you to help define our strategy and lay the foundations for all of OpenAI’s future video efforts. We value engineers who take initiative and demonstrate ownership over the systems they work on.

In this role, you will:

• Design and build systems for processing and transcoding large amounts of video
• Configure infrastructure like blob storage and CDNs for serving video
• Work with researchers to optimize distributed loading of video for model training
• Work with engineers and product managers to shape our product and technical roadmap
• Create an inclusive culture that makes all feel welcome while challenging group-think

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 6+ years of industry experience (outside of internships) in engineering, including 2+ years of experience with video infrastructure
• Engineered large-scale systems that process and serve petabytes of video – for example building an on-demand streaming service, or working on distributed processing of video or other multimedia for model training. 
• Understand the various video formats and codecs that exist and their relative strengths and weaknesses.
• Are comfortable with ambiguity and rapidly changing conditions as our team iterates on new product and research initiatives.
• Have an intrinsic desire to learn and fill in missing skills, and an equally strong talent for sharing that information clearly and concisely with others.

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.

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.