OpenAI

Software Engineer, Database Systems

OpenAI • $145K — $175K *
Mountain View, CA 94040In-Person
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Today
Be an Early Applicant
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 4+ years of relevant industry experience, including 2+ years leading large-scale projects or teams.
  • Expertise in distributed systems with a focus on performance, reliability, and scalability.
  • Strong communication skills for collaboration within technical and cross-functional teams.
  • Proficiency in C++ or a similar systems programming language is preferred.
  • Fluency with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform.
  • Experience with Linux systems and CI/CD pipelines.
  • Familiarity with modern observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, etc.).

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and operate high-performance distributed systems.
  • Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks to enhance infrastructure scalability.
  • Define long-term technical direction and guide system evolution.
  • Collaborate with product, engineering, and research teams for reliable infrastructure.
  • Investigate and resolve complex production issues across the stack.
  • Contribute to incident response and system reliability best practices.

Benefits

  • Opportunity to work on cutting-edge distributed systems.
  • Collaborative environment with cross-functional teams.
  • High autonomy to influence technical direction.
  • Engagement with challenging, high-impact projects.
  • Focus on continuous improvement and system reliability.
Full Job Description
About the Role:

We are looking for engineers passionate about distributed systems, close-to-the-metal performance optimization (our core engine is written in C++), and building scalable database infrastructure from the ground up. As an engineer on the Database Systems team, you'll contribute to the core database engine, driving improvements across ingestion, query execution, indexing, and storage. You'll partner with teams across OpenAI to unlock new product capabilities and help scale online database reliability and throughput as usage grows by orders of magnitude.

In this role you will:
  • Design, build, and operate high-performance distributed systems
  • Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks to scale infrastructure to the next order of magnitude
  • Define long-term technical direction and guide system evolution
  • Collaborate with product, engineering, and research teams to deliver scalable and reliable infrastructure
  • Dig deep into complex production issues across the stack
  • Contribute to incident response, postmortems, and best practices for system reliability

You might thrive in this role if you:
  • Have significant experience building, scaling, and optimizing distributed systems at scale
  • Are curious about database internals, storage engines, or low-latency query systems
  • Enjoy debugging challenging performance issues in complex, high-throughput systems
  • Have experience operating production clusters at scale (e.g., Kubernetes or other orchestration systems)
  • Think rigorously about scalability, correctness, and reliability
  • Thrive in fast-paced environments with high autonomy and impact

Qualifications:
  • 4+ years of relevant industry experience, with 2+ years leading large scale, complex projects or teams as an engineer or tech lead
  • Experience with distributed systems at scale, with a strong focus on performance, reliability, and scalability
  • Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across highly technical and cross-functional teams
  • Proficiency in a systems programming language such as C++ (our core engine is written in C++) is strongly preferred
  • Fluency in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure) and IaC tools (Terraform or similar)
  • Experience with Linux systems, CI/CD pipelines, and modern observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, etc.)
  • Domain knowledge in areas such as databases, data systems, storage engines, indexing, and query processing is a plus but not required

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. The company was founded in 2015 by a group of technology leaders, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and John Schulman. OpenAI's mission is to develop and promote friendly AI for the betterment of humanity. The company has developed a number of cutting-edge AI technologies, including GPT-3, a language processing system that can generate human-like text. OpenAI has received funding from a number of high-profile investors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Learn more about OpenAI
Size
100 employees
Industry
Information Technology
Founded
2015
* Ladders Estimates

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