Demo

Software Engineer, Core Services

OpenAI
OpenAI Salary
San Francisco, CA Full Time
POSTED ON 7/26/2026
AVAILABLE BEFORE 9/19/2026
About The Team

The Core Services team is responsible for building and managing foundational services. It acts as the bridge between core infrastructure (e.g. compute, storage, networking) and product engineering teams, and enables product teams to move fast, build reliably, and scale efficiently.

About The Role

As a software engineer in the core services team, you will design and operate critical backend platforms such as caching systems, workflow orchestration, metadata stores, and file services. You’ll focus on building highly reliable, scalable, and performant systems that serve as the backbone of our products.

We’re looking for people who are passionate about building infrastructure that empowers product teams, love working on distributed systems challenges, and enjoy creating well-designed APIs and abstractions that accelerate development.

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.

In This Role, You Will

  • Design, build, and maintain shared infrastructure services such as caching layers, workflow orchestration (Temporal), metadata stores, and file storage services.
  • Collaborate with product teams to provide scalable, reliable primitives that abstract the complexities of distributed systems.
  • Improve performance, resilience, and scalability of core services that power customer-facing applications.

You Might Thrive In This Role If You

  • Have experience with distributed systems, caching infrastructure (e.g., Redis, Memcached), metadata storage (e.g., FoundationDB), or workflow orchestration (e.g., Temporal, Cadence).
  • Have experience running containerized services in cloud environments and integrating them into automated build/test/release (CI/CD) workflows.
  • Understand trade-offs in consistency models, replication strategies, and performance optimization in multi-region systems.
  • Excel at communication and collaboration with cross-functional teams, and are obsessed with delivering customer success.

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.

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.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

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: $230K - $385K

Salary : $230,000 - $385,000

If your compensation planning software is too rigid to deploy winning incentive strategies, it’s time to find an adaptable solution. Compensation Planning
Enhance your organization's compensation strategy with salary data sets that HR and team managers can use to pay your staff right. Surveys & Data Sets

What is the career path for a Software Engineer, Core Services?

Sign up to receive alerts about other jobs on the Software Engineer, Core Services career path by checking the boxes next to the positions that interest you.
Income Estimation: 
$97,257 - $120,701
Income Estimation: 
$123,167 - $152,295
Income Estimation: 
$123,167 - $152,295
Income Estimation: 
$146,673 - $180,130
Income Estimation: 
$97,257 - $120,701
Income Estimation: 
$123,167 - $152,295
Employees: Get a Salary Increase
View Core, Job Family, and Industry Job Skills and Competency Data for more than 15,000 Job Titles Skills Library

Job openings at OpenAI

  • OpenAI Seattle, WA
  • About The Team OpenAI’s mission is to build safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) that benefits all of humanity. Achieving this requires bringing the ... more
  • 2 Days Ago

  • OpenAI Seattle, WA
  • About OpenAI OpenAI is dedicated to ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. Our mission requires building not only wo... more
  • 2 Days Ago

  • OpenAI Seattle, WA
  • About The Team OpenAI, in close collaboration with our capital partners, is building the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. The Power & Lan... more
  • 2 Days Ago

  • OpenAI Seattle, WA
  • About The Team OpenAI, in close collaboration with our capital partners, is embarking on a journey to build the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure eco... more
  • 2 Days Ago


Not the job you're looking for? Here are some other Software Engineer, Core Services jobs in the San Francisco, CA area that may be a better fit.

  • paveakatroveinformationtechnologies San Francisco, CA
  • Who We Are At Pave, we're building the industry’s leading compensation platform, combining the world's largest real-time compensation dataset with deep exp... more
  • 28 Days Ago

  • Anyscale San Francisco, CA
  • About Anyscale At Anyscale, we're on a mission to democratize distributed computing and make it accessible to software developers of all skill levels. We’r... more
  • 14 Days Ago

AI Assistant is available now!

Feel free to start your new journey!