Engineering Manager, ChatGPT Search Infrastructure
About this role
Leaders who enjoy bridging the gap between foundational artificial intelligence research and high-scale consumer applications will find a natural home guiding the ChatGPT Search Infrastructure team at OpenAI. Engineering managers in this group shape the core systems that connect advanced models with real-time information sources, enabling timely and reliable answers for a global user base. Daily efforts involve setting technical direction for search orchestration, low-latency serving, model integration, and shared platforms that empower product teams to iterate rapidly without sacrificing reliability.
The position exists to establish leverage across multiple search product verticals by building extensible platforms with robust guardrails, automated testing, and observability controls. Individuals will collaborate closely with post-training, inference, indexing, and retrieval groups to coordinate regionalized GPU and CPU provisioning and maintain strict service level objectives. Success in the group requires technical depth across distributed systems, a strong commitment to growing senior talent, and the ability to navigate ambiguity while maintaining high operational standards.
What you will do
- Define and drive the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for ChatGPT Search Infrastructure.
- Lead and develop a team of experienced engineers while fostering an inclusive, high-trust culture.
- Partner with post-training on model launches, experiments, and prompt optimization.
- Build reusable platforms that enable product vertical teams to independently implement, test, and launch features.
- Collaborate with inference, indexing, and retrieval teams to evolve the end-to-end search architecture.
- Define and uphold service objectives of at least 99.9% availability and sub-second latency.
- Establish strong engineering practices across system design, observability, and incident prevention.
What you need
- Experience managing senior engineers and leading teams responsible for complex, high-scale infrastructure or distributed systems.
- Significant technical depth in backend infrastructure, platform engineering, APIs, low-latency serving, or experimentation platforms.
- Understanding of how models, prompts, inference systems, search orchestration, indexing, retrieval, and infrastructure work together.
- Demonstrated history of partnering with research or post-training teams to launch models or run controlled experiments.
- Experience building shared platforms that allow other engineering teams to independently develop and launch features.
- Background in shaping system architecture with demanding availability, latency, and scale requirements.
Benefits
- Offers Equity
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What team does this role manage?
The role leads the team responsible for ChatGPT’s Search Infrastructure. This group builds the foundational systems that power search experiences and connect models with real-time information sources.
What is the compensation range for this position?
The salary range for the role is $401K to $445K, and the position includes offers of equity. The job is located in San Francisco.
Who does this team partner with?
The team partners closely with post-training on model launches and prompt optimization, search product verticals on new user experiences, and inference teams on GPU efficiencies. Additional partners include indexing, retrieval, and capacity or fleet teams.
What are the primary technical focus areas for the infrastructure?
Work spans search orchestration, APIs, model and prompt integration, serving infrastructure, experimentation, evaluation, and observability. The architecture must support service objectives of at least 99.9% availability and sub-second latency.