Software Engineer, System Enablement | OpenAI Careers ## Software Engineer, System Enablement Scaling - San Francisco and Seattle Apply now(opens in a new window) **About the Team** The Scaling team is responsible for the architectural and engineering backbone of OpenAI’s infrastructure. We design and deliver advanced systems that support the deployment and operation of cutting-edge AI models. Our work spans system software, networking, platform architecture, fleet-level monitoring, and performance optimization. **About the Role** We’re looking for an engineer who can take early, sometimes messy, pre-production hardware and make it “real”: bootstrapped, stable, imaged, joined to the right Kubernetes control plane, registered correctly, scheduled, and observable. You’ll sit at the intersection of early HW bring-up, provisioning automation, fleet/cluster management systems, and lab or cloud provider integration—turning new SKUs into capacity that is usable by internal customers. **Key Responsibilities** * Own the end-to-end bring-up and bootstrap path for new systems and compute nodes from *bare metal/early access in lab or production/cloud environments* to *schedulable fleet capacity*: image build, user-data/config, cluster join, and readiness gates. * Build and maintain “first-class” golden image + provisioning workflows across lab, and production environments, including working with partner-provided base images and reconciling OS/version requirements. * Work with partner teams to integrate nodes into our fleet infrastructure and IaC pipelines (Terraform, Chef, etc.), ensuring cloud resources map cleanly onto our internal lifecycle expectations (e.g., VMSS/instance pools, image references). * Partner with scheduling and platform owners to ensure new hardware is reachable and scheduled (pool definitions, network/WAN connectivity/routing, admission controls, platform-specific quirks), including cases where new SKUs require changes for scheduling integration. * Drive registration and inventory correctness (e.g., systems that track nodes and their metadata), including hands-on support to get nodes registered and visible end-to-end. * Collaborate with partner teams to implement baseline health + telemetry bring-up: minimum viable health signals, pass/fail checks, and automated reporting suitable for early ramp decisions * Debug issues across layers: PXE/boot-loader, UEFI/BIOS, BMC, OS bring-up, NIC/network reachability, kubelet/control-plane connectivity, storage constraints, and early rack/lab realities. **Qualifications** * BS in CS/EE (or equivalent practical experience). * 5+ years of experience in systems SW development and building/operating Linux-based infrastructure in production or pre-production environments. * Strong, hands-on experience with: + Kubernetes cluster operations (node lifecycle, bootstrap/join, debugging control-plane connectivity) + Infrastructure-as-Code / config management (Terraform, Chef/Ansible, etc.) + Provisioning and imaging (PXE/iPXE, golden images, cloud-init/user-data) + Networking fundamentals (L2/L3, routing, DNS, fire-walling; comfort debugging reachability * Proven ability to write automation in Python/Go/Bash and ship operational tooling/run-books. **Preferred Skills** * Experience bringing up new hardware platforms (early silicon/servers/NICs) in a lab setting and turning them into stable fleet capacity. * Multi-cloud operational experience (Azure/GCP/AWS/OCI), especially with compute pools (e.g., VMSS / instance pools). * Experience building telemetry/health pipelines (agent-based metrics/logging, health rollups, readiness criteria). * Familiarity with WAN, peering, and multi-site network concepts for cluster deployments. **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 capabiliti

Software Engineer, System Enablement

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