Applied AI, Senior Engineering Manager, Infrastructure

About the Team

The Applied AI team safely brings OpenAI's technology to the world. We released ChatGPT, Plugins, DALL·E, and the APIs for GPT-4, GPT-3, embeddings, and fine-tuning. We also operate inference infrastructure at scale. There's a lot more on the immediate horizon.

We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth.

We serve end-users directly through ChatGPT, and serve developers through our APIs, which power product features that were never before possible. 

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced and visionary engineering leader to guide our infrastructure efforts across reliability and scalability, developer experience, data infrastructure, and beyond. This role will help to grow our infrastructure team from a single team to a network of multiple more specialized teams over the next few quarters.

Within the next year, we expect this role to look like a director of engineering or head of infrastructure. That being said, the current team is small, and we’re looking for a leader to help us grow and mature the team and org structure from the ground up.

In this role, you will:

• Hire and manage a diverse, high-performing infrastructure engineering team (including ICs as well as managers) 
• Set and own core infrastructure KPIs and metrics such as availability and latency SLOs
• Ensure our infrastructure can scale reliably to the next several orders of magnitude
• Define and communicate a clear vision for the future of our infrastructure
• Accelerate developer productivity
• Streamline the technical interface between research teams and production
• Coach engineers as well as managers to uplevel their impact
• Create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture that makes all feel welcome while enabling radical candor and the challenging of group think

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 10+ years of experience in engineering leadership, including managing managers
• Care deeply about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and have a track record of building inclusive teams
• Have a strong track record of coaching managers and engineers to achieve their peak potential
• Can dive into our infrastructure, intuit how it works, identify blind spots, and craft suggestions that will lay the foundations for technical excellence
• Have experience closing competitive candidates for your team, and the ability to craft and convey compelling visions of the future
• Have a voracious and intrinsic desire to learn and fill in missing skills—and an equally strong talent for sharing learnings clearly and concisely with others
• Are comfortable with ambiguity and rapidly changing conditions. You view changes as an opportunity to add structure and order when necessary
• Take pride in building and operating scalable, reliable, secure infrastructure

As technical context: at the heart of our infrastructure is a large-scale deployment of GPU nodes running in dozens of Kubernetes clusters across regions. Some core technologies we build with include Terraform, Postgres, Cosmos DB, Kafka, Python, and FastAPI.

This role is exclusively based in our San Francisco HQ. We 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. 

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, Benefits and Perks

The annual salary range for this role is $300,000 – $500,000. Total compensation also includes generous equity and benefits.

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family
• Mental health and wellness support
• 401(k) plan with 4% matching
• Unlimited time off and 18+ company holidays per year
• Paid parental leave (20 weeks) and family-planning support
• Annual learning & development stipend ($1,500 per year)