Infrastructure Support Engineer, Public Sector

About the Team

Join the engineering teams that bring OpenAI’s ideas safely to the world!!

The Applied Engineering team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to consumers and businesses. We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth.

About the Role

We’re seeking an Infrastructure Support Engineer experienced in troubleshooting, observability and secure deployment practices for classified environments. You'll work directly with OpenAI’s cutting-edge AI technology, deploying, managing, and securing applications critical to public sector missions. In this role, you'll collaborate cross-functionally with engineering, security, compliance, and global affairs teams, ensuring operational excellence and rigorous adherence to security standards.

This role is based at a customer site in Los Alamos, New Mexico and will require working on-site 5 days a week. Relocation assistance is available for new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Monitor infrastructure and Kubernetes-based applications in classified environments, swiftly responding to incidents and performance issues.

• Partner closely with engineering teams to deploy, scale, optimize, and manage containerized applications.

• Conduct proactive troubleshooting of application performance, leveraging tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, and ELK for observability.

• Coordinate and manage secure software releases into air-gapped environments, ensuring thorough testing and compliance with strict security protocols.

• Oversee secure software movement, maintaining stringent compliance with classified security policies, and conducting integrity checks on software deployments.

• Enforce security best practices, including least privilege access (LPA), role-based access controls (RBAC), and classified incident response procedures.

• Ensure adherence to physical security guidelines, manage facility access, secure media handling, and data sanitization practices.

• Maintain detailed, audit-ready documentation for all operational and security activities.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Hold an active Q or TS/SCI security clearance.

• Have 5+ years managing infrastructure and applications within classified or restricted environments.

• Demonstrate strong skills in application observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, ELK) for catching and troubleshooting issues.

• Familiarity and experience with NIST 800-53, NIST 800-171, CMMC, FedRAMP, or similar security frameworks.

• Exhibit proven capability in incident response support and physical security management within classified settings.

• Familiar with secure CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes GitOps workflows, and DevSecOps practices.

• Thrive in dynamic, high-stakes environments, owning challenges end-to-end and rapidly learning new technologies as needed.

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.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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.

If you have questions, feedback, or input about this job posting, please reach out to [email protected].

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.