engineering
Posted Jul 29, 2025Software Engineer, Database Systems
at openai
San Francisco, United StatesOn-site
Requirements
- Our team built Rockset, the real-time search, analytics, and vector database that powers all vector search and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) at OpenAI.
- In addition to retrieval, as an online database, Rockset powers core functionality across all of OpenAI's product lines and many critical internal use cases.
- 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.
- 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
- 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 AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence
Experience
- Qualifications: - 4+ years of relevant industry experience, with 2+ years leading large scale, complex projects or teams as an engineer or tech lead -
Additional details
- About the Team: The Database Systems team specializes in high-performance distributed databases.
- 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
- 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