Software Engineer, Build Systems / CI

About the Role The Engineering Acceleration team builds and operates the foundational systems that engineers use to build, test, and ship ChatGPT, the API, and OpenAI's infrastructure. We are looking for an engineer to help evolve our build and CI systems for a fast-growing engineering organization. This role sits at the intersection of developer productivity, build systems, distributed infrastructure, and software quality. You will work on systems that make engineering faster and safer: reliable CI pipelines, scalable Bazel infrastructure, high-signal test selection, fast feedback loops, and tooling that helps engineers understand and fix failures quickly. Our mission is to make OpenAI one of the most productive engineering organizations in the world while preserving a high bar for correctness, reliability, and safety. In This Role, You Will Design, build, and operate CI infrastructure that gives engineers fast, reliable feedback on every change. Improve Bazel-based build and test workflows across a large, polyglot codebase, including dependency modeling, remote caching, remote execution, and build/test performance. Build systems that reduce unnecessary CI work through affected-target detection, test selection, caching, batching, and smarter scheduling. Partner closely with product and infrastructure teams to understand their workflows, pain points, and reliability needs, then turn those into practical platform improvements. Improve the observability and debuggability of build and CI failures, making it easier for engineers to distinguish product regressions, infrastructure failures, and flakes. Use modern AI tools to rethink how engineers interact with CI: failure explanation, fix suggestions, automatic retries, and agent-assisted debugging. Own the reliability of the systems you build, including participating in an on-call rotation for critical developer infrastructure. Technologies Commonly Used In This Environment Include Bazel and Starlark for large-scale build and test workflows Buildkite for CI orchestration Python and FastAPI for internal services Kubernetes for large-scale infrastructure Terraform for infrastructure as code Postgres, Kafka, and other systems used to power internal engineering platforms You May Be A Strong Fit If You Have 5+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience building infrastructure or tooling for developers. Have hands-on experience with Bazel, Buck, Pants, Gradle, or similar build systems, and understand the tradeoffs of hermetic builds, dependency graphs, caching, and remote execution. Have built or operated CI systems at scale, especially in environments where build time, queue time, test flakiness, and developer trust materially affect engineering velocity. Care deeply about developer experience and have empathy for the small sources of friction that slow teams down or create operational toil. Are comfortable debugging distributed systems and using metrics, logs, traces, and structured data to understand reliability and performance problems. Can work across teams, communicate clearly, and turn ambiguous productivity problems into concrete technical plans. Are excited to apply AI to developer infrastructure in ways that make engineers faster without weakening quality or safety. 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) u