Software Engineer, Online Storage

Details

About the Team

We are the Online Storage team powering ChatGPT, Sora, and the OpenAI APIs. We own the databases and online-storage infrastructure that serve all our products and operate in a fast-paced, collaborative environment serving hundreds of millions of users globally with a strong emphasis on safety, reliability, and performance.

About the Role

As OpenAI scales, we are seeking experienced, problem-solving engineers to build robust, high-performance, and scalable database systems. You will help design and build a large-scale database, collaborate with product teams to scale it to meet their needs, and own operational excellence by defining SLAs and KPIs. This role emphasizes building resilient systems that perform under load and iterating rapidly on product and research initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Design and build highly scalable, reliable, and performant databases and online storage systems.
• Design and build simple and intuitive APIs for the underlying database.
• Analyze and resolve performance and scalability bottlenecks to improve overall system efficiency.
• Debug, instrument, and fix system issues — from pinpointing root causes to delivering long-term solutions.
• Define technical strategy and guide the development of robust infrastructure that supports high-scale production systems and evolving business needs.
• Collaborate closely with product teams to deeply understand requirements and deliver impactful solutions.
• Build internal tools that boost engineering productivity when off-the-shelf solutions fall short.
• Own the reliability of the systems you build, including participating in an on-call rotation to address critical incidents.

Requirements / Qualifications

• 4+ years of industry experience, including 2+ years leading large-scale, complex projects or technical initiatives as an engineer or tech lead.
• Strong passion for building distributed systems at scale, focusing on reliability, scalability, security, and continuous improvement.
• Expertise in systems programming, with hands-on experience in multi-threading and concurrency.
• Proficiency in C++ and/or Python is highly preferred.
• Preferably, domain experience in databases, large-scale data systems, storage, caching, search, or other core components of distributed infrastructure.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to build consensus across diverse technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Benefits

• Base pay in the listed range plus equity and performance-related bonus for eligible employees.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental leave, paid medical and caregiver leave, flexible PTO, and paid company holidays/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.

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 AI capabilities and seek to safely deploy them through our products. OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.