Jobs / United States / OpenAI UK Ltd
Software Engineer - Data Aquisition (systems)
OpenAI UK Ltd · 🇺🇸 San Francisco
Sponsorship verdict
No sponsorship evidence yet
No government record and no wording either way. Not a refusal — ask the recruiter.
- No government sponsor record hereThis employer does not appear with approvals in the government data SponsorApply holds.
- The posting doesn’t mention sponsorshipSilence isn’t a refusal — ask the recruiter before investing much time.
- No salary bar for this routeH-1B has no fixed salary bar: the employer must pay at least the prevailing wage for the role and area. Cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level. Source: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/29/2025-23853/weighted-selection-process-for-registrants-and-petitioners-seeking-to-file-cap-subject-h-1b, rules effective 2026-02-27.
- Confirmed live todayWhen a source last listed this job as open.
US H-1B: cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level — Level I gets 1 entry, Level IV gets 4 (DHS projected selection odds ≈15% at Level I to ≈61% at Level IV). Universities and non-profit research employers are cap-exempt. The $100,000 fee for new petitions from abroad is currently blocked by a court order (appeal pending).
A verdict summarises public evidence; it is not legal advice and never a guarantee — the employer and the immigration authority decide. Sign in to factor in where you can already work.
Or apply yourself on the official page →
Why not apply?
No register record and no sponsorship wording in the posting. Worth asking the employer before investing significant time.
SponsorApply flags time-wasters so your applications go where they can land. These come from the posting's own wording — read the original listing to confirm. See better-fit alternatives →
Sponsor Radar — OpenAI UK Ltd
This employer does not appear with approvals in the government data SponsorApply holds.
Past sponsorship or register membership never guarantees sponsorship for this vacancy or for you. Full Sponsor Radar for OpenAI UK Ltd →
About the role
ABOUT THE TEAM This team builds and operates the systems that enable OpenAI researchers to run reliable, scalable, and efficient research workflows. The team sits close to research and works across infrastructure, systems, and automation to make sure researchers have the tools and environments they need to move quickly. The work spans software engineering, infrastructure, systems administration, cluster operations, and reliability engineering. As OpenAI’s infrastructure evolves from bespoke bare-metal systems toward more standard, scalable platforms, the team needs engineers who can understand how systems work end-to-end and build the right abstractions without reinventing the wheel. ABOUT THE ROLE As a Software Engineer on this team, you will build and operate the infrastructure that supports frontier research and critical research-facing systems. You will work on systems that sit close to the metal, but the role is not limited to classic operations or sysadmin work. We are looking for someone who can reason about networking, bootstrapping, Kubernetes, scalability, automation, and reliability - while also writing software to make these systems better over time. This role is a strong fit for an independent, high-ownership engineer who enjoys reliability-heavy infrastructure work but still wants to build. You do not need to come in as a kernel expert or highly algorithmic optimization engineer, but you should be deeply curious about infrastructure, comfortable debugging complex systems, and excited to support researchers doing novel work. WE EXPECT YOU TO: - Build and operate reliable infrastructure for research workloads and research-facing services. - Support and improve systems across data infrastructure, processing, crawl and ingest, caching, search, observability, and clusterwide services. - Improve cluster bootstrapping, provisioning, automation, and deployment workflows. - Debug issues across networking, compute, storage, orchestration, and service reliability layers. - Build software and automation that reduce manual operational work and improve system reliability. - Partner closely with researchers, infrastructure engineers, and service owners to understand system needs and translate them into durable solutions. - Help evolve existing infrastructure toward more scalable, maintainable, and standard patterns. - Take ownership of critical systems and drive work independently from problem definition through execution. YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU: - Have strong systems fundamentals and understand how infrastructure scales in practice. - Are comfortable with Linux, networking, Kubernetes, provisioning, and distributed systems operations. - Can write software to automate, debug, and improve infrastructure systems. - Have a strong execution mindset and can independently drive ambiguous infrastructure work. - Enjoy supporting a wide surface area of systems, from research tooling to platform services. - Are pragmatic about when to build custom systems versus using existing, well-supported tools. - Care about building reliable systems that make researchers faster and reduce operational friction. NICE TO HAVE: - Experience with PXE boot, cluster provisioning, bare-metal infrastructure, or large-scale fleet management. - Experience operating Kubernetes or similar orchestration systems at scale. - Experience with infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, observability, or deployment automation. - Experience supporting search infrastructure, data platforms, ingest systems, or large-scale research workflows. - Experience with Git-based workflows and internal developer tooling. - Prior experience in environments where reliability, scale, and speed all matter. About OpenAI