About the Role
We’re looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to found and lead the ChatGPT Infrastructure team in London. You’ll lead a small, talent-dense, high-impact team building the core runtime primitives and infrastructure that underpin how new ChatGPT experiences are built and scaled. This is a high-ownership, 0→1 leadership role blending hands-on technical leadership, startup-style problem solving, and founding-team building. You’ll operate with a high degree of autonomy, working closely with product and research teams to design and build critical, load-bearing infrastructure components, while establishing the engineering culture and high-trust environment that will come to define our London presence.
You will
- Build and lead a small, talent-dense team responsible for foundational runtime systems powering ChatGPT.
- Drive the development of core infrastructure primitives that product engineers rely on to build new ChatGPT experiences (e.g., runtime frameworks, service integration patterns, and extensibility mechanisms within the ChatGPT runtime).
- Define and evolve the technical architecture of the ChatGPT runtime, unlocking new feature capabilities as part of our next phase of rapid growth.
- Work closely with product and research teams to ensure infrastructure enables rapid product development while maintaining strong reliability and operational discipline.
- Own the reliability of the systems your team builds—participating in incident response, supporting deployments, and helping evolve our operational model toward a follow-the-sun global infrastructure team.
- Hire and develop the early London team, helping establish the technical bar, culture, and operating model that will define our London engineering presence.
- Serve as a technical leader and connector between the London office and the broader global ChatGPT infrastructure organization.
Qualifications
- 7+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, ideally building large-scale distributed systems, developer platforms, or infrastructure products.
- Experience building and leading high-caliber engineering teams, particularly in startup or early-stage initiatives within larger companies.
- Proven ability to create a high-trust, high-agency culture where strong engineers can move quickly, take ownership, and operate effectively in ambiguous environments.
- Strong judgment in hiring and talent development, with a track record of building small, high-performing teams and maintaining a high technical bar.
- Track record of remaining deeply technical as a leader, contributing to architecture and design decisions while enabling others to do their best work.
- Experience operating in 0→1 or high-ambiguity environments, where teams are defining problems and building systems from scratch.
- Experience running production systems in cloud environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure).
- Based in or willing to relocate to London.