Software Engineer, RL Training Infra

Job description

ABOUT THE TEAM The Post-Training Frontiers team is responsible for training the frontier agents OpenAI ships to the world (GPT-Next). We train the flagship agentic models behind Codex, ChatGPT, and the API through large-scale reinforcement learning. The team’s work spans four areas. First, execution and science: working with teams across OpenAI to decide what can go into the final model and how, using scientific experiments and evals that are representative of the final pipeline so issues can be recognized early. Second, RL scaling: executing the final large-scale reinforcement learning run, making sure GPUs are used efficiently and training stays healthy. Third, research: improving horizontal capabilities like instruction following, factuality, memory, and multi-agent behavior, where the team’s broad visibility helps identify cross-cutting improvements across teams and domains. Fourth, engineering: maintaining the infrastructure stack and internal tools to ensure that both the final run and all integrations go as smoothly as possible and that the systems are easy to work with. ABOUT THE ROLE This role focuses on keeping our frontier RL training runs fast, reliable, and unblocked. You will work across engineering and infrastructure problems as they emerge, from scaling and orchestration issues to inference bottlenecks, numerical problems, and hardware failures, as well as supporting large horizontal integrations in the big run, like multi-agent capabilities or memory. This is a role for a strong generalist who quickly learns anything needed for the task, has high attention to detail, debugs deeply, and is motivated by fixing the highest-impact problem in front of the team. IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL: - Keep large-scale async RL training runs moving by jumping into the most urgent engineering and infrastructure problems. - Debug issues across training systems, inference, orchestration, scaling, and distributed infrastructure. - Improve the reliability and efficiency of RL training runs. - Help researchers who are developing infrastructure-heavy integrations, such as multi-agent capabilities or memory. - Turn recurring operational issues into better tools, systems, processes, automations, or abstractions. - Work closely with research, infrastructure, and partner teams during tight model-run timelines. - Become useful quickly in messy, ambiguous areas where ownership matters more than a perfectly scoped project. - Debug hard failures in shipped or near-shipped models and turn messy qualitative behavior into concrete hypotheses, experiments, and fixes. YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU: - Are driven by having a large impact on the world and want to train and ship the best model in the world to our users. - Are a strong generalist engineer with experience in some layer of ML infrastructure. - Learn extremely quickly and are comfortable operating across unfamiliar layers. - Are highly independent and can plan and fix issues on your own when needed. - Have worked on RL, inference, scaling, training systems, orchestration, or adjacent infrastructure. - Are a strong debugger with high ownership, low ego, and excellent communication skills. - Can land in a messy area with tight timelines, become useful quickly, and gradually raise the quality of the whole system. - Thrive in fast-moving environments where reliability, speed, and judgment matter. - Are comfortable collaborating with multiple teams across OpenAI, both in research and in product. - Like building load-bearing systems and processes when that is what the team needs, even if the work is not glamorous. - Are very proactive about fixing any important issue that you encounter. - Are very good at prioritizing your work and often take an 80/20 approach, moving on to different problems after optimizing for low-hanging fruit. - Enjoy helping other people with their work. - Continuously try to automate the annoying parts of your work. NICE TO HAVE: - Experience supporting large-scale model training, async RL systems, or high-throughput ML infrastructure. - Experience debugging distributed systems across GPUs, networking, orchestration, or inference stacks. - A background in performance optimization, scaling, or production-critical infrastructure. - Experience directly supporting researchers or fast-moving model teams. 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 data security obligations. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241. OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf 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.