About the Role
We’re looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to found and lead the ChatGPT Infrastructure team in London.
You’ll lead a small, talent-dense, high-impact team building the core runtime primitives and infrastructure that underpin how new ChatGPT experiences are built and scaled.
This is a high-ownership, 0→1 leadership role blending hands-on technical leadership, startup-style problem solving, and founding-team building.
You’ll operate with a high degree of autonomy, working closely with product and research teams to design and build critical, load-bearing infrastructure components, while establishing the engineering culture and high-trust environment that will come to define our London presence.
You will
- Build and lead a small, talent-dense team responsible for foundational runtime systems powering ChatGPT.
- Drive the development of core infrastructure primitives that product engineers rely on to build new ChatGPT experiences (e.g., runtime frameworks, service integration patterns, and extensibility mechanisms within the ChatGPT runtime).
- Define and evolve the technical architecture of the ChatGPT runtime, unlocking new feature capabilities as part of our next phase of rapid growth.
- Work closely with product and research teams to ensure infrastructure enables rapid product development while maintaining strong reliability and operational discipline.
- Own the reliability of the systems your team builds—participating in incident response, supporting deployments, and helping evolve our operational model toward a follow-the-sun global infrastructure team.
- Hire and develop the early London team, helping establish the technical bar, culture, and operating model that will define our London engineering presence.
- Serve as a technical leader and connector between the London office and the broader global ChatGPT infrastructure organization.
Qualifications
- 7+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, ideally building large-scale distributed systems, developer platforms, or infrastructure products.
- Experience building and leading high-caliber engineering teams, particularly in startup or early-stage initiatives within larger companies.
- Proven ability to create a high-trust, high-agency culture where strong engineers can move quickly, take ownership, and operate effectively in ambiguous environments.
- Strong judgment in hiring and talent development, with a track record of building small, high-performing teams and maintaining a high technical bar.
- Track record of remaining deeply technical as a leader, contributing to architecture and design decisions while enabling others to do their best work.
- Experience operating in 0→1 or high-ambiguity environments, where teams are defining problems and building systems from scratch.
- Experience running production systems in cloud environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure).
- Based in or willing to relocate to London.
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.
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