About the team

We believe that increasing compute is a huge lever to AI progress.

The Supercomputing team owns the entire process of building OpenAI’s compute and infrastructure, which includes 1) the sourcing of hardware and system design, 2) the deployment of huge clusters using Kubernetes and Azure, 3) operating the compute platform for running/training the world’s largest AI models.

We work at the very cutting edge of speed and scale, combining Site Reliability Engineering practices with the traditions of High-Performance Computing (HPC), in a modern cloud and containerized environment.

We build some of the largest Supercomputers in the world. When our Owl cluster launched it in 2019 it would've been among the top 5 of the TOP500 supercomputers in the world. Since then we've only continued to grow. See this blog post to get a sense of what kind of challenges we solve in our day-to-day work: Scaling Kubernetes to 7,500 Nodes

You won’t encounter any other organization in the world with as much compute per employee. We are a small team that moves quickly, with access to huge resources, working with a direct impact on the success of OpenAI and, by extension, the field of AI as a whole.

In this role, you will:

• Help set a vision for your team, and then ensure we efficiently achieve our goals
• Ensure your team of engineers are performing at their peak, are growing, and advancing in their careers
• Create a diverse and inclusive culture that makes all feel welcome while enabling radical candor and the challenging of group think
• Work with leadership to ensure projects are on track, your team is utilized effectively, and core engineering needs are continuously addressed
• Provide technical direction and mentorship

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have at least 5 years of experience as an individual contributor engineer and at least 3 years of experience as an engineering manager
• Have a strong bias toward action, and won’t take no for an answer
• Are deeply thoughtful about culture, DEI, and team structure with a track record of improving these areas
• Can dive into our codebase, intuit how it works, and be able to have a strong intuition for suggestions that will lead us to a stronger engineering position.
• Experience creating and dismantling engineering processes with a strong experience-driven intuition for crafting minimal, simple processes
• Experience closing competitive candidates for their team and the ability to craft and convey compelling visions of the future
• 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