Software Engineer, Real Time
Company: OpenAI
Location: Seattle, WA
Type: Full-time
Level: mid
Posted: 2026-02-17
About this role
About The Team
We bring OpenAI's technology to the world through products like ChatGPT and the OpenAI API. Our customers build fast-growing businesses around our APIs, which power products that were never before possible. We simultaneously ensure that our powerful tools are used responsibly. Safe deployment is more important to us than unfettered growth.
The Engineering team manages a massive fleet of GPUs with scalable, robust infrastructure powered by Kubernetes, Go, Python, Terraform, Kafka, Postgres, and Snowflake.
About The Role
We’re looking for experienced and creative engineers to help us scale our existing systems and build the next-generation system to enable a whole new class of products. We are seeking an engineer who is comfortable with full-stack development and has experience with Real-Time Communication (RTC). Candidates should have experience with scaled real-time communication systems in production.
Responsibilities
- Design and build development and production platforms that power our systems.
- Partner with researchers, engineers, product managers, and designers to bring new features and research capabilities to the world.
- Accelerate engineering productivity by empowering your fellow engineers with excellent tooling and systems.
- Build and provide operational support for globally deployed systems, powering some of the most advanced products in the market. This includes participating in an on-call rotation to respond to critical incidents as needed.
You Might Thrive In This Role If You
- Have significant experience building (and rebuilding) production systems to deliver new product capabilities and handle increasing scale.
- Have experience with real-time communication products and systems, including audio and video calling, WebRTC or competing protocols, encoding/decoding, signaling, lip sync, etc.
- Care deeply about user experience and take pride in building products that solve customer needs.
- Have a hu...