Software Engineer, Hardware Health
Frontiers Clusters - San Francisco
About the Team
The Hardware Health and Observability team owns the end-to-end health lifecycle of OpenAI’s global compute fleet.
Our mission is to maximize healthy, usable compute across accelerator vendors, generations, cloud providers, and regions through reliable health signals, automated remediation, and scalable operational tooling.
We build the systems that observe, detect, remediate, and verify hardware issues across GPUs, CPUs, networking, and platform infrastructure, enabling frontier model training and inference workloads to run reliably at hyperscale. We are the last line of defense for the success of OAI’s production and research workloads.
About the Role
On the Hardware Health and Observability team, you’ll build critical infrastructure that keeps OpenAI’s largest compute clusters healthy and operational at scale.
Even small numbers of unhealthy systems can impact large-scale training and inference workloads. This team focuses on minimizing downtime, improving fleet efficiency, and ensuring compute resources remain continuously available to researchers and product teams.
Engineers on this team own problems end-to-end, from defining health signals and debugging failures to building automated remediation systems that operate across millions of GPUs globally.
In this role, you will:
Define and maintain health signals across GPUs, CPUs, networking, and platform infrastructure.
Build and evolve health checks that detect, remediate, and verify failures at scale.
Ensure critical health checks execute with minimal latency to maximize workload uptime.
Investigate hardware failures and system-level issues across large-scale compute environments.
Own node lifecycle workflows including drain, quarantine, repair, RMA, and return-to-service processes.
Build automation and tooling that enables global cluster management with minimal manual intervention.
Partner with workload, reliability, and provider teams to integrate health signals into training and inference systems.
You might thrive in this role if you have:
7+ years of industry experience in software or infrastructure engineering.
Strong proficiency with Python and shell scripting.
Experience building large-scale distributed systems or infrastructure platforms.
Comfort digging into noisy operational data using SQL, PromQL, or similar tooling.
Experience building reproducible analyses and operational tooling.
Strong systems debugging and operational instincts with an ownership mindset.
Bonus if you have:
Experience with low-level hardware systems and Linux tooling (e.g. PCIe, InfiniBand, RoCE, networking, power management, kernel performance tuning, FW/SW debugging).
Experience operating or debugging large-scale GPU or accelerator clusters.
Expertise in network operations, observability, or systems telemetry.
Experience with automated remediation systems or fleet lifecycle management.
Experience improving reliability, utilization, or workload uptime in distributed compute environments.
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.
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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.
Compensation
$250K – $445K + Offers Equity
The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.
Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
401(k) retirement plan with employer match
Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
Mental health and wellness support
Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
Relocation support for eligible employees
Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.
More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.
This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.