Software Engineer, Foundations Search

About this role

Join OpenAI's Foundations Search team to design and scale retrieval infrastructure that powers agentic AI systems. You'll build indexing, serving, and retrieval pipelines that enable models to access and act on global information reliably at massive scale.

What you'll do

• Build and scale retrieval infrastructure across indexing, serving, and query execution
• Develop low-latency, high-throughput systems for real-time model interaction
• Partner with researchers to productionize embedding and retrieval techniques
• Support dense, sparse, and hybrid retrieval pipelines
• Own system performance, reliability, and observability at scale
• Collaborate across teams to integrate retrieval end-to-end and contribute to model-system interfaces

What they're looking for

• Distributed systems design and scaling
• Search, retrieval, or indexing systems experience
• Embedding-based or ML-powered systems
• Performance optimization and production reliability
• Cross-functional collaboration between ML and systems
• First-principles problem solving
• Low-latency system design
• Information retrieval fundamentals