Software Engineer, Habitat (Online Data)

Details

Online Data builds and operates Habitat, the single product surface of Online Data and the system of record for OpenAI’s online user data. Habitat is evolving into a full-stack, one-size-fits-most database platform with end-to-end ownership of provisioning and developer experience, APIs and guardrails, scaling, performance and reliability, data movement, caching, routing and placement, privacy enforcement and access control, Change Data Capture (CDC), and the foundation for future storage backends.

The role focuses on building and operating Habitat services that handle high-QPS, latency-sensitive workloads across regions. The engineer will partner with internal platform and product teams to ship safe, reliable systems and improve performance and cost efficiency through caching, routing, observability and operational tooling.

Responsibilities

• Design and build core abstractions spanning storage, caching, routing, CDC and privacy enforcement.
• Own a major surface area end to end, from product and API design through operational excellence.
• Improve latency, correctness and cost efficiency for production workloads at massive scale.
• Build strong instrumentation, debugging workflows and developer-first tooling.
• Collaborate with internal product and infrastructure teams to understand requirements and ship pragmatic solutions.
• Participate in an on-call rotation and improve reliability, performance and usability.

Requirements

• 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, including simple abstractions, strong defaults, guardrails and debuggability.
• Comfort owning ambiguous problems end to end and driving roadmap and execution.
• Experience in one or more of databases, caching systems, routing and load balancing, indexing and retrieval, or CDC pipelines.
• Deep experience with tail latency and global performance optimization, including p95, p99, request steering and locality.
• Experience designing platform APIs consumed by many internal teams.
• Experience with multi-region systems, consistency semantics and failover design.
• 8+ years of industry experience building production software, including 3+ years leading large-scale, complex projects or technical initiatives as a tech lead or senior individual contributor.
• 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 is preferred for core systems work; Python is commonly used for tooling, services and ecosystem integration.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to build alignment and drive decisions across diverse technical and non-technical stakeholders.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

Benefits

• Base salary range of $230,000–$385,000, plus equity.
• Medical, dental and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health, dependent care and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, company holidays, office closures, and paid sick and safe time.
• Mental health and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily office meals and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional taxable fringe benefits may include charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.