At a Glance
- Tasks: Design and maintain backend systems for high-traffic ChatGPT experiences.
- Company: Join OpenAI, a leader in AI research and deployment.
- Benefits: Competitive salary, flexible work options, and opportunities for professional growth.
- Other info: Collaborative environment with a focus on innovation and diversity.
- Why this job: Make a real impact on AI technology that benefits humanity.
- Qualifications: 4+ years in software engineering with backend or distributed systems experience.
The predicted salary is between 70000 - 85000 £ per year.
About the Team
Our London-based team builds the backend systems that help Chat GPT scale reliably.
We work on infrastructure close to the product, partnering with engineering teams to improve the performance, resilience, and operability of critical user-facing systems.
Our work combines backend software engineering with distributed systems and production reliability.
We build shared capabilities, improve high-traffic workflows, and make it easier to introduce new product functionality without compromising performance or availability.
About the Role
This role is for software engineers who want to build and evolve backend systems operating at significant scale.
You'll write production code, design shared infrastructure, and solve technical challenges involving performance, distributed systems, and system reliability.
You'll also own how those systems behave in production: how changes are rolled out, how issues are detected and diagnosed, and how recurring operational problems can be addressed through better software and system design.
This is a strong fit for backend engineers who enjoy complex systems problems and want a direct connection between the infrastructure they build and the experience of Chat GPT users.
- Design, build, and maintain backend systems supporting high-traffic Chat GPT experiences.
- Develop shared services, APIs, and infrastructure that help product teams build and launch new capabilities safely.
- Improve the performance, scalability, and efficiency of production systems as usage and product complexity grow.
- Build and improve systems for asynchronous processing and other large-scale backend workloads.
- Lead architectural improvements and infrastructure migrations while maintaining correctness, compatibility, and safe rollout and rollback.
- Strengthen monitoring, alerting, and diagnostics to detect problems early and reduce customer impact.
- Participate in on-call, incident response, and root-cause analysis, and turn operational learnings into lasting engineering improvements.
- Work across product and infrastructure teams to ensure new systems are reliable, secure, and production-ready.
- Build automation and tooling that reduce repetitive operational work and improve engineering effectiveness.
- Have experience building and operating backend systems at scale.
- Understand distributed systems concepts such as concurrency, consistency, asynchronous processing, and failure handling.
- Enjoy writing production code while taking ownership of how systems behave in real-world conditions.
- Can identify and address bottlenecks affecting latency, throughput, resource usage, or reliability.
- Have experience introducing production changes safely through testing, staged rollouts, monitoring, and rollback plans.
- Are comfortable investigating ambiguous technical problems and collaborating across teams to resolve them.
- Care about clear interfaces, maintainable systems, and practical engineering tradeoffs.
- Take ownership of projects from design and implementation through deployment and ongoing improvement.
Qualifications
- 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant experience building backend or distributed systems.
- Strong proficiency in at least one general-purpose programming language and experience writing reliable, maintainable production code.
- Experience designing, building, or improving services, platforms, or shared infrastructure at scale.
- Familiarity with production reliability practices, including monitoring, incident response, root-cause analysis, and operational readiness.
- Experience diagnosing performance, scalability, or reliability issues in production environments.
- Understanding of distributed systems, data storage, concurrency, asynchronous processing, or networking.
- Familiarity with modern deployment, observability, and cloud infrastructure practices
- Ability to lead complex technical work and collaborate effectively across product and infrastructure teams.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure, containerized environments, or observability tools is useful but not required.
We welcome candidates from backend engineering, distributed systems, platform engineering, and reliability backgrounds.
About Open AI
Open AI 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 Open AI's Aff… 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 Open AI 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 .
Open AI Global Applicant Privacy Policy At Open AI, 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.
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Software Engineer, ChatGPT Infrastructure employer: Ritual Ads ®
OpenAI is an exceptional employer, offering a dynamic work environment in London where innovation meets responsibility. As a Software Engineer in the Privacy Engineering team, you will have the opportunity to work on meaningful projects that ensure user data protection while collaborating with diverse teams. With a strong focus on employee growth, OpenAI fosters a culture of continuous learning and values the unique perspectives of its workforce, making it an ideal place for those passionate about technology and ethics.
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We think this is how you could land Software Engineer, ChatGPT Infrastructure
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We think you need these skills to ace Software Engineer, ChatGPT Infrastructure
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Show off your coding skills:When applying for a software engineering role, it's super important to showcase your coding skills. Make sure your CV includes your tech stack, any relevant programming languages you’re comfortable with, and examples of projects you've worked on. If you have a GitHub profile, link it up! We love to see code in action.
Tailor your portfolio:For a full-time role, we’d expect to see some solid examples of your work in your portfolio. Make sure to include at least two or three projects that highlight your problem-solving skills and your ability to work with different technologies. Focus on the projects that are most relevant to the position at Ritual Ads ®.
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How to prepare for a job interview at Ritual Ads ®
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