Level

OpenAI

Software Engineer, Delivery / CD

OpenAI is hiring a Software Engineer, Delivery / CD in San Francisco, United States. It pays $210k-$490k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on OpenAI.

Level's read on this job

  • On Level's scale, this software engineer role is Uses AI ●●○○: an ordinary role that requires AI tools.
  • The listed pay starts 25% above the typical software engineer posting on Level.
  • Tools and skills the posting cites include Kubernetes, Python and FastAPI.
  • Level lists 793 other open roles at OpenAI.

AI in this role

Design and build continuous deployment infrastructure with support for agent-assisted and autonomous deployment workflows.

kubernetespythonfastapiterraformargocdfluxbuildkite
ai-researchcontinuous-deploymentdistributed-systemsgitopsinfrastructure-as-codeplatform-engineering

About the Role

The Engineering Acceleration Delivery / Continuous Deployment team builds and operates the systems that safely ship OpenAI’s infrastructure and product code to production.

We own the deployment platform, release pipelines, and rollout safety mechanisms that allow engineers across OpenAI to deploy changes rapidly while minimizing operational risk. Our mission is to make production deployments fast, safe, and increasingly autonomous.

This role sits at the intersection of developer productivity, distributed systems reliability, and large-scale infrastructure orchestration.

In This Role, You Will

  • Design and build continuous deployment infrastructure that safely rolls out changes across dozens of Kubernetes clusters and global regions.

  • Develop systems for progressive delivery, including canary releases, staged rollouts, and automated rollback.

  • Improve engineering velocity by reducing friction in the release pipeline and automating manual operational workflows.

  • Work with product and infrastructure teams to ensure their services are deployable, observable, and resilient at scale.

  • Implement and evolve deployment methodologies such as GitOps, infrastructure-as-code, and progressive delivery patterns.

  • Build systems that automatically evaluate deployment health using metrics, logs, traces, and alerts to detect regressions and trigger safe rollbacks.

  • Build systems that support agent-assisted or autonomous deployment workflows using modern AI tooling.

Technologies commonly used in this environment include:

  • Kubernetes for large-scale container orchestration and runtime infrastructure

  • Python and FastAPI for internal services

  • Terraform for infrastructure as code

  • GitOps-based deployment workflows (e.g., ArgoCD, Flux, or similar systems)

  • Buildkite for CI orchestration

You may be a strong fit if you:

  • Have worked with Kubernetes-based deployment systems at scale

  • Have experience building or operating continuous deployment platforms

  • Are familiar with GitOps tooling such as ArgoCD or Flux

  • Are excited about building AI-assisted systems and agents that intelligently shepherd software changes from commit to safe production rollout.

  • Care deeply about safe production rollouts and minimizing blast radius

  • Enjoy building internal platforms that improve developer productivity across the organization

Compensation

$230K – $490K + Offers Equity

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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. 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.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

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.

How we rate this

Software Engineer, Delivery / CD at OpenAI rates 40 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Uses AI (AI Level 2 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Uses AI. An ordinary role that requires AI tools.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI ResearchContinuous DeploymentDistributed SystemsGitopsInfrastructure As CodePlatform EngineeringKubernetesPython

Also common in software engineer jobs at this level

Pay

This job starts at
$210k
Typical software engineer job
$168k

This posting starts 25% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
  2. Tell me about a project where continuous deployment was part of your work. What did you do?
  3. Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
  4. Tell me about a project where gitops was part of your work. What did you do?
  5. Tell me about a project where infrastructure as code was part of your work. What did you do?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: AI Research, Continuous Deployment, Distributed Systems, Gitops, and Infrastructure As Code. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Put the AI tool in a bullet point about what you did, not just in a skills list. This role treats it as a required part of the job.

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