Software Engineer, Foundations Search
OpenAI · San Francisco
About this role
About the Team The Foundations Research team works on high-risk, high-reward ideas that could shape the next decade of AI. Our goal is to advance the science and data that enable our training and scaling efforts, with a particular focus on future frontier models. Pushing the boundaries of data, scaling laws, optimization techniques, model architectures, and efficiency improvements to propel our science. The Search team sits within Foundations, building agentic search by co-designing model - system interfaces with the core search stack (serving, indexing, retrieval) to translate model intent into reliable, real-world actions. Operating at the frontier of AI and information retrieval, the team develops large-scale systems that transform and index vast corpora, enabling models to reason over global knowledge and act dependably. In close partnership with researchers, we rapidly bring modeling breakthroughs into production and redefine how intelligent systems discover, retrieve, and synthesize information at planetary scale. About the Role We’re looking for a Software Engineer focused on building and scaling retrieval systems. You’ll work with a team of researchers and engineers to develop infrastructure that enables models to retrieve and act on the right information at the right time. This includes designing and operating indexing systems, retrieval pipelines, and serving layers. This work supports retrieval across OpenAI products and research, with direct impact on system performance, reliability, and scale. Responsibilities - Build and scale retrieval infrastructure across indexing, serving, and query execution. - Develop low-latency, high-throughput systems for real-time model interaction. - Partner with research to productionize embedding and retrieval techniques. - Support dense, sparse, and hybrid retrieval pipelines. - Own system performance, reliability, and observability at scale. - Collaborate across Pretraining, Inference, and Product teams to integrate retr
Excerpt from the posting OpenAI published. Read the full description on their site before applying.
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About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core. OpenAI is dedicated to putting that alignment of interests first - ahead of profit. To achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. Our investment in diversity, equity, and inclusion is ongoing, executed through a wide range of initiatives, and championed and supported by leadership. 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.
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