Software Engineer, Traffic Infrastructure

ABOUT THE TEAM The Cloud Infrastructure team builds and operates the infrastructure behind OpenAI’s products, including ChatGPT and the API. Within Cloud Infrastructure, the Traffic team owns how traffic enters our cloud environments, moves between services, clusters, and regions, and reaches external dependencies. Our work spans cloud networking, Kubernetes networking, ingress and egress gateways, proxies, load balancing, and traffic steering. We build the systems, controls, and observability that make these paths reliable, secure, efficient, and straightforward for other engineering teams to use. ABOUT THE ROLE You’ll build and operate the networking and traffic infrastructure that connects OpenAI’s products and services across clouds and regions. The team’s work spans L3, L4, and L7—from IP connectivity, NAT, and transport behavior to service proxies and application request routing. You’ll bring depth in part of this stack and curiosity about how the whole path works. Projects may include building gateways and control planes, improving cross-region connectivity, diagnosing packet loss or connection exhaustion, and making routing changes safer and easier to operate. This role combines software engineering with production ownership. You’ll turn ambiguous networking problems into durable improvements, working closely with service owners, infrastructure teams, Security, and cloud providers. This role is based in San Francisco, CA or Seattle, WA. IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL: - Design, build, and operate ingress, egress, and service-to-service connectivity across clusters, regions, and clouds. - Develop proxies, gateways, controllers, and automation for routing, load balancing, failover, and traffic management. - Build and evolve cloud networking infrastructure, including private connectivity, NAT, and network isolation. - Diagnose failures and performance bottlenecks across application, proxy, transport, and cloud networking layers; work with cloud providers when issues extend into their infrastructure. - Build telemetry and diagnostic tools that explain traffic paths, identify failing components, and help engineers take effective action. - Partner with Security to implement and validate traffic-path protections, including secure service communication, access controls, egress restrictions, and DDoS defenses. - Improve latency, throughput, availability, and network efficiency through measurement, testing, and careful production rollouts. - Create clear interfaces and safe defaults for service teams, participate in on-call, and turn operational lessons into changes that prevent recurring failures and reduce manual work. YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU: - Have 5+ years of experience building production infrastructure or distributed systems, including substantial work on networking or traffic infrastructure. - Have depth in one or more areas such as cloud networking, Kubernetes networking, proxies and gateways, service meshes, load balancing, or global traffic routing. - Understand networking fundamentals and can reason about how IP routing, TCP/UDP, DNS, NAT, TLS, and HTTP/gRPC affect connectivity and performance. - Have hands-on experience building or operating systems such as Envoy, NGINX, Istio, Cilium, or comparable networking infrastructure. - Write production software in Go, Rust, C++, Python, or a similar language, and use software and automation to solve operational problems. - Can investigate unfamiliar failures using evidence, test hypotheses, and follow problems through to a verified resolution. - Take ownership of design, implementation, rollout, and ongoing reliability, and communicate clearly across teams when a problem crosses ownership boundaries. - Care about making infrastructure secure and understandable for the engineers who depend on it. We value deep expertise and the willingness to learn across boundaries. You do not need prior experience with every technology or networking layer listed above. 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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. 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 d