About the Team

The Applied team safely brings OpenAI's technology to the world. We released ChatGPT; Plugins; DALL·E; and the APIs for GPT-4, GPT-3, embeddings, and fine-tuning. We also operate inference infrastructure at scale. There's a lot more on the immediate horizon.

Our customers build fast-growing businesses around our APIs, which power product features that were never before possible. ChatGPT is a prime example of what is currently possible. We simultaneously ensure that our powerful tools are used responsibly. Safe deployment is more important to us than unfettered growth.

The infrastructure that powers the API and ChatGPT is a large-scale deployment of GPU nodes running in dozens of Kubernetes clusters in many regions. The Applied Infrastructure team ensures we have a reliable, highly available platform while setting us up for exponential growth. It additionally ensures that developer productivity remains high to enable us to quickly productize the frontiers of research.

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced and visionary engineering leader to strategically guide and exponentially grow Applied Engineering's infrastructure efforts. This role will entail transitioning from a single infrastructure team to a network of specialized teams over the next few quarters, focusing on areas such as reliability, developer tooling, capacity, and data infrastructure.

Within the next year, we expect this role to look similar to a director of engineering or head of infrastructure. However; since our current team is still small, the expectation is that this role will start with a single team of individual contributors and grow into a much larger set of teams.

In this role, you will:

• Manage both individual contributors and managers
• Identify critical understaffed areas and proactively hiring the requisite talent, including individual contributors and leaders.
• Set and own the core infrastructure KPIs and metrics such as availability and latency SLOs
• Ensure our infrastructure can scale reliably to the next several orders of magnitude
• Set and communicate a clear vision for the future of our infrastructure
• Accelerate developer productivity
• Create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture that makes all feel welcome while enabling radical candor and the challenging of group think

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 10+ years in engineering leadership, including managing managers
• Care deeply about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and have a track record of building inclusive teams
• Have a strong track record of coaching managers and engineers to achieve their peak potential
• Can dive into our infrastructure, intuit how it works, and be able to have a strong intuition for suggestions that will lead us to a stronger engineering position.
• Experience closing competitive candidates for their team and the ability to craft and convey compelling visions of the future
• Very high emotional intelligence and deeply empathetic personality. A strong ability to read between the lines and genuinely connect with a diverse range of fellow colleagues
• A voracious and intrinsic desire to learn and fill in missing skills. An equally strong talent for sharing that information clearly and concisely with others
• Are comfortable with ambiguity and rapidly changing conditions. You view changes as an opportunity to add structure and order when necessary
• Experience in Machine Learning techniques is a plus, but not required

This role is exclusively based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.