IT Systems Engineer - London

About the Team

The SysOps Team partners closely with IT Support, IT Engineering, and Enterprise Security teams to streamline workflows, unify processes, and coordinate technical operations. We handle technical support escalations and manage critical SaaS and self-hosted services with a strong emphasis on security, scalability, and reliability. Our responsibilities include essential System Administration and GitOps-driven initiatives that enhance deployment, configuration management, and CI/CD workflows, and Employee Lifecycle Operations. As we grow, our team is committed to championing GitOps and automation, significantly advancing OpenAI’s capabilities in managing cloud and on-premise environments. Success in this role will rely heavily on expertise in system administration, scripting, automation, and proficiency with tools such as Terraform and GitHub.

About the Role

As a Systems Engineer, you will manage global IT Support Escalations and major incidents, with rotating on-call responsibilities. Your expertise in SaaS and System Administration will contribute to ongoing efforts to transform IT system management practices. Additionally, you will have the opportunity to operationalize and maintain GitOps workflows and CI/CD methodologies.

You will partner closely with other IT and Security Teams to streamline and document solutions, enabling the SysOps team to not only manage escalations effectively, but also help accelerate progressive deployments, upgrades, and administration of both SaaS and internally hosted systems. Your technical expertise will ensure reliability, scalability, and consistency across both Cloud and On-premise operational environments.

This is a hybrid role requiring a presence in our London office 3 days per week.

In this role, you will:

• Serve as the primary technical escalation point for IT Support, resolving complex issues and acting as a bridge between Tier 1 support and IT Engineering.

• Act as a cross-functional liaison, facilitating clear communication and collaboration between service desk, IT Engineering, and Enterprise Security teams.

• Provide on-call coverage and manage IT incidents, ensuring timely resolution and continuity of service.

• Mentor and upskill service desk team members through training, documentation, and guided hands-on support.

• Proactively identify and implement improvements to support workflows and operational processes.

• Manage access control, application support, systems integration, and AV troubleshooting with deep domain expertise.

• Leverage and maintain SaaS applications, IDPs like Azure, and MDM platforms such as Jamf and Intune to ensure enterprise-grade service delivery.

• Drive operational readiness and scalability of self-hosted applications in line with SaaS management standards.

• Automate routine processes and streamline cross-functional operations using Bash, Python, and infrastructure as code tools like Terraform.

• Support CI/CD pipelines and manage GitOps workflows to enhance deployment, patching, and system maintenance efforts.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• You excel at partnering with cross-functional teams—IT Support, Engineering, and Security—to improve service delivery and manage incidents with clear, timely communication.

• You are a trusted escalation point for complex IT issues, providing world-class support and ensuring timely resolution across a global user base.

• You have hands-on experience with incident management and on-call operations, coordinating real-time response efforts to restore service and minimize user impact.

• You have practical experience managing and maintaining enterprise SaaS platforms and self-hosted systems in fast-paced environments.

• You are adaptable, detail-oriented, and continuously look for ways to improve system performance, team productivity, and the end-user experience.

• You proactively develop internal tools, documentation, and runbooks to reduce friction, increase transparency, and upskill peers.

• You are proficient in identity and access management (IAM), leveraging tools such as Azure/Entra ID, Jamf, and Intune to maintain strong security postures.

• Design and implement scalable automation workflows across ITSM and ITAM use cases using SOAR platforms like Tines, as well as scripting tools such as Bash, Python, Terraform, and Ansible to streamline routine IT operations.

• You have hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), especially in resolving escalations related to infrastructure, networking, and storage.

• You are deeply familiar with GitOps practices and CI/CD tools such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, or Jenkins to enhance operational stability and release velocity.

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.

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

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.