Software Engineer, Evals Infrastructure (Preparedness)

About The Team

The Safety Systems team is responsible for various safety work to ensure our best models can be safely deployed to the real world to benefit the society and is at the forefront of OpenAI's mission to build and deploy safe AGI, driving our commitment to AI safety and fostering a culture of trust and transparency.

Frontier AI models have the potential to benefit all of humanity, but also pose increasingly severe risks. To ensure that AI promotes positive change, the Preparedness team helps us prepare for the development of increasingly capable frontier AI models. This team is tasked with identifying, tracking, and preparing for catastrophic risks related to frontier AI models.

Specifically, The Mission Of The Preparedness Team Is To

• Closely monitor and predict the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems, with an eye towards misuse risks whose impact could be catastrophic (not necessarily existential) to our society; and
• Ensure we have concrete procedures, infrastructure and partnerships to mitigate these risks and, more broadly, to safely handle the development of powerful AI systems.
  
  

Our team will tightly connect capability assessment, evaluations, and internal red teaming for frontier models, as well as overall coordination on AGI preparedness. The team’s core goal is to ensure that we have the infrastructure needed for the safety of highly-capable AI systems—from the models we develop in the near future to those with AGI-level capabilities.

About The Role

As OpenAI continues to grow, we are looking for experienced, problem-solving engineers to ensure our systems scale. Our success depends on our ability to quickly iterate on products while also ensuring that they are performant and reliable. You will work in a deeply iterative, collaborative, fast-paced environment to bring our technology to millions of users around the world, and ensure it’s delivered with safety and reliability in mind. Successful candidates will play a crucial role in ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of our systems as we continue to expand. As a reliability expert, you will be at the forefront of maintaining and enhancing the stability, scalability, and performance of our rapidly evolving infrastructure. You will work closely with cross-functional teams, including software engineers, product managers, and data scientists, to build and maintain resilient systems that can handle our growing user base and workload.

In This Role, You Will

• Work on scaling our infrastructure to support a wide variety of evaluations, supporting systems and automation.
• Collaborate with development teams to make our systems more reliable (owning Production Readiness Reviews)
• Implement and manage monitoring systems to proactively identify issues and anomalies in our production environment.
• Develop and maintain service level objectives (SLOs) and service level indicators (SLIs) to measure and ensure system reliability.
• Implement fault-tolerant and resilient design patterns to minimize service disruptions.
• Build and maintain automation tools to streamline repetitive tasks and improve system reliability.
• Partner with engineers and researchers at OpenAI to help bring frontier research capabilities to the world.
• Participate in an on-call rotation to respond to critical incidents and ensure 24/7 system availability.
  
  

You Might Thrive In This Role If You

• Enjoy seeking out and addressing bottlenecks and areas for performance improvement in our systems.
• Utilize Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles to automate infrastructure provisioning and configuration management.
• Are experienced in collaborating with cross-functional teams to ensure that reliability and scalability are considered in the design and development of new features and services.
• Have a track record of accelerating engineering reliability by empowering your fellow engineers with excellent tooling and systems.
• Help create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture that makes all feel welcome while enabling radical candor and the challenging of group think.
• Have a humble attitude, an eagerness to help your colleagues, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed.
• Own problems end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done.
  
  

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field (or equivalent work experience).
• Have at least 7+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Proven experience as an reliability engineer or a similar role in a fast-paced, rapidly scaling company.
• Strong proficiency in cloud infrastructure.
• Proficiency in programming/scripting languages.
• Experience with containerization technologies and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
• Knowledge of IaC tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Excellent problem-solving and troubleshooting skills.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.
• Experience with observability tools such as DataDog, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk and ELK stack.
• Experience with microservices architecture and service mesh technologies.
• Knowledge of security best practices in cloud environments.
  
  

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.

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.

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.