Software Engineer, Database Systems
OpenAIVisit OpenAI website
AI research and deployment company building and deploying frontier AI products, including ChatGPT, Codex, and its API platform.
49 current maintainers29 active leads5 new active leads117 lead step-downs16 early lead departures
San Francisco, United States
Projects
About OpenAI
OpenAI’s mission is to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. It consists of the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation and OpenAI Group, a public benefit corporation governed by the Foundation.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will contribute to the core database engine, driving improvements across ingestion, query execution, indexing, and storage. You'll design and operate distributed systems, resolve performance bottlenecks, define technical direction, and participate in incident response and postmortems.
Requirements
- 4+ years of relevant industry experience, with 2+ years leading large scale projects or teams
- Experience with distributed systems at scale
- Strong communication skills
- Proficiency in a systems programming language such as C++ strongly preferred
- Fluency in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure) and IaC tools (Terraform)
- Experience with Linux, CI/CD pipelines, and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana)
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate high-performance distributed systems
- Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks
- Define long-term technical direction and guide system evolution
- Collaborate with product, engineering, and research teams
- Dig into complex production issues across the stack
- Contribute to incident response, postmortems, and reliability best practices
Benefits
- Equity
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance with HSA employer contributions
- Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter pre-tax accounts
- 401(k) with employer match
- Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks birth parents, 20 weeks non-birthing parents)
- Paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
- Flexible PTO for exempt employees
- 13+ paid company holidays and company office closures
- Paid sick or safe time
- Mental health and wellness support
- Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
- Annual learning and development stipend
- Daily meals in offices and meal delivery credits
- Relocation support
- Charitable donation matching and wellness stipends