Engineering Manager, Cloud Infrastructure Automation

About the Team

The Cloud Infrastructure team builds and operates the foundational platform that powers OpenAI’s production AI systems. We own large-scale Kubernetes platforms, cluster lifecycle and upgrades, global networking and traffic routing, service mesh, and the automation and guardrails that make the system reliable, secure, and scalable by default.

Our mission is to make infrastructure predictable and boring at massive scale—so research and product teams can move fast without compromising safety, reliability, or efficiency. We operate at the intersection of platform engineering, distributed systems, and global networking, supporting products used by millions of users worldwide.

About the Role

We are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead core Cloud Infrastructure teams responsible for OpenAI’s Kubernetes-based platform. This role is fundamentally about platform leadership: building teams, setting technical direction, and delivering infrastructure primitives that scale with OpenAI’s growth.

You will manage engineers working on cluster lifecycle, infrastructure automation, reliability mechanisms, and networking foundations. You will partner closely with adjacent infrastructure, security, and product teams to ensure the platform can support rapid expansion in scale, regions, and workloads.

This is a high-ownership leadership role with direct responsibility for production systems operating at extreme scale.

What You’ll Do

• Build, lead, and grow high-performing infrastructure engineering teams.

• Own the evolution of OpenAI’s Kubernetes platform, including cluster lifecycle, upgrades, configuration standards, and safety mechanisms.

• Set and enforce platform-level reliability goals (SLIs/SLOs), ensuring reliability is designed into the system.

• Drive infrastructure automation across provisioning, upgrades, remediation, and fleet consistency using Terraform and internal tooling.

• Reduce operational toil and incident frequency through better abstractions, guardrails, and self-healing systems.

• Establish clear ownership boundaries, technical direction, and execution discipline.

You Might Thrive in This Role If You:

• Have significant experience managing infrastructure or platform engineering teams.

• Bring deep hands-on understanding of Kubernetes at scale and distributed systems.

• Have operated production infrastructure with strict reliability, latency, and security requirements.

• Can balance technical depth with organizational leadership and long-term strategy.

• Have a strong track record of hiring, developing, and retaining senior engineers.

• Are comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and creating clarity for others.
  

Technical Environment

• Kubernetes across many clusters and regions

• Service mesh (Istio / Envoy)

• Global networking and load balancing (Cloudflare, cloud-native primitives)

• Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and internal automation

• Observability via metrics, logging, and tracing

• Large-scale production systems with high reliability and safety requirements

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.

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.

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