The role
From OpenAI's own posting.
About the Team
The ChatGPT Search Infrastructure team builds the foundational systems that power search experiences across ChatGPT. We develop the infrastructure that connects models with search systems and other sources of real-time information, enabling ChatGPT to deliver timely, relevant, and trustworthy answers to users around the world.
Our work sits at the intersection of product engineering, AI, and large-scale infrastructure. We build shared platforms and abstractions that enable product teams to independently develop, evaluate, and launch new search-powered experiences. These platforms provide the guardrails, testing capabilities, observability, and rollout controls needed to prevent reliability, scalability, quality, and latency regressions while supporting rapid product iteration.
The team partners closely with:
Post-Training on model launches, experimentation, and prompt optimization
Search product verticals on new user experiences
Inference on GPU efficiencies
Indexing and Retrieval on the systems that identify and deliver relevant information
Capacity/Fleet team to ensure optimal regionalized provisioning of GPUs and CPUs
About the Role
We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the team responsible for ChatGPT’s Search Infrastructure.
You will set the technical and organizational direction for the systems that bring search capabilities into ChatGPT. You will guide architectural decisions across search orchestration, model and prompt integration, serving infrastructure, experimentation, observability, evaluation, and product integrations. You will balance immediate launch and product needs with the long-term reliability, scalability, latency, and maintainability of the platform.
A central responsibility of this role is creating leverage for Search product verticals. You will lead the development of extensible platforms that allow those teams to independently build, test, and launch features without requiring ongoing involvement from the core infrastructure team. These platforms must include strong interfaces and automated guardrails that enable fast iteration while protecting the reliability, scalability, latency, and quality of ChatGPT Search.
This role requires technical depth across the full Search stack and the ability to understand and influence systems owned by partner teams. You will be expected to develop a coherent technical direction across model behavior, inference, search orchestration, indexing, retrieval, experimentation, and infrastructure—even when execution spans multiple organizational boundaries.
You will lead multiple complex workstreams, empower experienced engineers to own major technical areas, and partner with product, research, Post-Training, Search Quality, Inference, Indexing, Retrieval, and infrastructure teams to translate emerging model and search capabilities into reliable experiences operating at global scale.
In this role, you will:
Define and drive the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for ChatGPT Search Infrastructure, spanning search orchestration, APIs, model and prompt integration, serving, experimentation, evaluation, observability, and product integrations.
Lead and develop a team of experienced engineers, create meaningful ownership opportunities, and foster an inclusive, high-trust culture with clear accountability and high standards.
Partner with Post-Training on model launches, A/B experiments, search-behavior evaluation, and prompt optimization, translating model improvements into production-ready product experiences.
Build reusable platforms that enable Search product vertical teams to independently implement, test, and launch features, with automated guardrails that protect reliability, scalability, quality, and latency.
Partner with Inference, Indexing, and Retrieval teams to evolve the end-to-end Search architecture, adapt serving optimizations, and improve product outcomes across the stack.
Define and uphold service objectives of at least 99.9% availability, sub-second latency where required by the user experience, and the scalability needed to support ChatGPT’s continued growth.
Establish strong engineering practices across system design, testability, observability, experimentation, capacity planning, rollout safety, operational readiness, and incident prevention.
Independently lead multiple complex workstreams, remove technical and organizational bottlenecks, and build alignment across product, research, and infrastructure teams in ambiguous and rapidly changing environments.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have experience managing senior engineers and leading teams responsible for complex, high-scale infrastructure, online serving, or distributed systems.
Bring significant technical depth in backend infrastructure, platform engineering, APIs, low-latency serving, experimentation platforms, or AI-powered product development.
Understand how models, prompts, inference systems, search orchestration, indexing, retrieval, and infrastructure work together to deliver an end-to-end user experience.
Have partnered with research or Post-Training teams to launch models, run controlled experiments, evaluate model behavior, or optimize prompts in production.
Have built shared platforms that allow other engineering teams to independently develop and launch features within well-defined reliability, scalability, quality, and performance guardrails.
Have shaped the architecture of systems with demanding availability, latency, and scale requirements, with testability, observability, safe rollout, and operational excellence built in from the outset.
Can move comfortably between technical depth, product strategy, organizational leadership, and people management while exercising strong judgment in ambiguous environments.
Build strong cross-functional partnerships, empower experienced engineers to lead, and care deeply about developing people and creating an inclusive, sustainable team culture.
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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