Software Engineer, Database Systems

Details

About the Team

The Database Systems team specializes in high-performance distributed databases. 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. 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.

Responsibilities

• 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

Requirements / 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 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 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. Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
• 13+ paid company holidays and multiple coordinated company office closures
• 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 as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends

(More details about benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.)