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OpenAI's Network Engineering team is seeking a Senior Network Engineer to design, operate, and continuously improve the global networks supporting OpenAI's offices, labs, campuses, cloud environments, and devices. This role combines strategic platform engineering with responsive production operations, requiring both architectural vision and hands-on operational excellence.
Key responsibilities include designing and operating secure, scalable enterprise networks across offices, labs, campuses, Points of Presence (PoPs), and hybrid cloud environments. You will set strategic direction through architecture, standards, roadmaps, lifecycle planning, and capacity strategy while owning production operations including on-call, incident response, and time-sensitive delivery. The role emphasizes turning recurring operational work into durable platforms, tooling, and standards through automation and Infrastructure-as-Code.
You will develop observability dashboards, telemetry, alerts, and health checks providing actionable visibility into network performance. Implementation experience with routing, switching, wireless, WAN, Internet edge, firewalls, NAC, segmentation, and core network services is essential. You'll lead network changes, migrations, site launches, and service improvements from design through validation, partnering with security teams to apply Zero Trust principles and least privilege access controls.
Required qualifications include hands-on experience designing and operating enterprise networks using platforms such as Cisco IOS, Cisco Meraki, Palo Alto, or Arista. Strong fundamentals in routing and switching (BGP, OSPF, VLAN/VRF design, WAN, high-availability patterns) are essential. Production troubleshooting experience across packets, logs, telemetry, and physical infrastructure is required. You should have network observability experience with tools like SNMP, syslog, NetFlow, ELK, or Grafana, and strong security fundamentals including ACLs, firewalls, VPN, 802.1X/NAC, and segmentation. Automation skills using Python, Go, Terraform, Ansible, and CI/CD tools are expected. Enterprise wireless and cloud/hybrid connectivity experience required.
Preferred qualifications include experience shaping multi-quarter network roadmaps while supporting production operations, optical transport and carrier services knowledge (DWDM, dark fiber, DIA), cloud and virtual WAN architectures (Azure Virtual WAN, AWS Transit Gateway), campus and data center architecture experience, and building internal platforms or AI-assisted automation that reduces operational toil.
The role is based in San Francisco with a hybrid work model of 3 days in-office per week. Relocation assistance is available for new employees.
