Software Engineer, Frontier Systems

About the Team

The Frontier Systems team at OpenAI builds, launches, and supports the largest supercomputers in the world that OpenAI uses for its most cutting edge model training.

We take data center designs, turn them into real, working systems and build any software needed for running large-scale frontier model trainings.

Our mission is to bring up, stabilize and keep these hyperscale supercomputers reliable and efficient during the training of the frontier models.

About the Role

On the Frontier Systems team, you’ll build critical infrastructure that keeps our supercomputers running reliably for cutting-edge AI research. Even a single hardware failure can derail a large-scale training run, so minimizing disruptions is core to the mission.

Engineers here own their work end-to-end and are trusted to make a real impact. This role is for someone who goes deep - who thrives on root-causing system-level issues and building automation to catch and fix problems at scale.

In this role, you will:

• Own and improve the system health checks that keep our hyperscale supercomputers stable during model training.

• Lead deep dives into hardware failures and system-level bugs to understand how things break at scale.

• Build automation that monitors and fixes issues across thousands of machines - so researchers can keep moving without interruption.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 7+ years of industry experience in software engineering 

• Proficiency with Python and shell scripting

• A high degree of comfort digging into noisy data with SQL, PromQL, and Pandas or any other tool necessary

• Experience developing reproducible analyses

• A balance of strengths in building and operationalizing

Prior hardware expertise is not required for this role.

Bonus if you have:

• Experience with low level details of hardware components, protocols, and associated Linux tooling (e.g., PCIe, Infiniband, networking, power management, kernel perf tuning)

• Experience with visualization of large data centers and networks.

• Expertise with network operations and tooling

• Expertise with power management and stabilization

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.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. 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.

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