engineering
Posted Apr 14, 2025Software Engineer, Habitat (Online Data)
at openai
Seattle, United StatesOn-site
Requirements
- Experience in one or more of: databases, caching systems, routing and load balancing, indexing and retrieval, CDC pipelines - Deep
- experience with tail latency and global performance optimization (p95, p99, request steering, locality) -
- Experience with multi-region systems, consistency semantics, and failover design
- experience building production software, including 3+ years leading large-scale, complex projects or technical initiatives as a tech lead or senior IC - Strong passion for building distributed systems at scale, with a focus on reliability, scalability, security, and continuous improvement - Proficiency in Rust and/or Python (Rust preferred for core systems work; Python commonly used for tooling, services, and ecosystem integration) - Excellent communication skills, with the ability to build alignment and
- About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence
Experience
- QUALIFICATIONS - 8+ years of industry
Additional details
- ABOUT THE TEAM Online Data builds and operates Habitat, the single product surface of Online Data and the system of record for OpenAI’s online user data. As OpenAI’s scale and product
- requirements evolve, Habitat is becoming a full-stack, one-size-fits-most database platform with end-to-end ownership of: - Provisioning and developer
- requirements and ship pragmatic solutions - Participate in an on-call rotation and raise the bar on reliability while aggressively improving performance and usability YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU HAVE - A strong track record building and operating high-scale backend or data-intensive distributed systems in production - Excellent systems judgment and the ability to make tradeoffs across latency, cost, correctness, and reliability - Deep care for developer
- experience: simple abstractions, strong defaults, guardrails, and debuggability - Comfort owning ambiguous problems end to end and driving roadmap plus execution -
- Experience designing platform APIs consumed by many internal teams -