Software Engineer, Traffic Infrastructure
OpenAI · San Francisco
About this role
## 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/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/L7** networking—from IP connectivity, NAT, and transport behavior to service proxies and application request routing. 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. **Location:** 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** (and coordinate with cloud providers when needed). - Build **telemetry and diagnostic tools** to explain traffic paths, identify failing components, and enable effective action. - Partner with **Security** to implement and validate traffic-path protections (secure service communication, access controls, egress restrictions, 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. ## You Might Thrive If You - Have **5+ years** of experience building production infrastructure or distributed systems, with substantial networking/traffic infrastructure experience. - Have depth in one or more areas such as **cloud networking, Kubernetes networking, proxies/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 with systems like **Envoy, NGINX, Istio, Cilium**, or comparable networking infrastructure. - Write production software in **Go, Rust, C++, Python**, or a similar language. - Can investigate unfamiliar failures using evidence, test hypotheses, and drive issues to verified resolution. - Take ownership of design, implementation, rollout, and reliability; communicate clearly across teams. - Care about making infrastructure **secure and understandable** for engineers who depend on it. ## About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose AI benefits all of huma
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