Engineering Manager, Data Infrastructure

About the Team

You’ll manage the team that’s behind OpenAI’s big data infrastructure that powers critical engineering, product, alignment teams that are core to the work we do at OpenAI. The systems we support include our data warehouse, batch compute infrastructure, data orchestration system, data lake, ingestion systems, critical integrations, and more.

About the Role

The Applied Data Platform organization designs, builds, and operates the foundational data infrastructure that enables products and teams at OpenAI. There are multiple teams under Applied Data Platform, including Big Data Compute, Core Data Infrastructure, Real-time Infrastructure, Data Productivity, Data Movement and others.

As an Engineering Manager on Big Data Compute, you’ll be tasked with leading and managing a team of highly experienced Data Infrastructure experts to build, maintain, and iterate on our systems. You will report to the Head of Applied Data Platform.

In addition to Data Infrastructure experience, you are well versed with infrastructure tooling such as Terraform, worked with Kubernetes, and have a strong SRE skillset.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Manage and support a diverse team of world class data infrastructure engineers.

• Design, build, and maintain data infrastructure systems such as distributed compute, data orchestration, distributed storage, streaming infrastructure while ensuring scalability, reliability, and security

• Ensure our data platform can scale reliably to the next several orders of magnitude

• Accelerate company productivity by empowering your fellow engineers & teammates with excellent data tooling and systems, providing a best in case experience

• Bring new features and capabilities to the world by partnering with product engineers, safety systems and other teams to build the technical foundations

• Set technical direction on evolving our compute and abstractions to support a growing business.

• Coach and nurture engineers to accelerate their growth and learning.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 10+ years of experience in software engineering, including 5+ years of experience in engineering management

• Have prior experience building out data infrastructure teams at scale

• Take pride in building and operating scalable, reliable products and systems

• Care deeply about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and have a track record of building inclusive teams

• Own problems end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done

• Take pride in building and operating scalable, reliable, secure systems

• Are comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change

• Have a voracious and intrinsic desire to learn and fill in missing skills—and an equally strong talent for sharing learnings clearly and concisely with others

Some of the technologies you’ll be working with include Apache Spark, Apache Iceberg, Airflow, Terraform, Kafka, Flink, Chronon etc.

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 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.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal hi