Software Engineer, Database Systems

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

• 4+ years of relevant industry experience
• 2+ years leading large scale, complex projects or teams as an engineer or tech lead
• Expertise in distributed systems at scale with a focus on performance and reliability
• Proficiency in C++ or other systems programming languages
• Fluency in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure) and IaC tools like Terraform
• Experience with Linux systems, CI/CD pipelines, and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana)

Preferred Qualifications

• Domain knowledge in databases, storage engines, indexing, or query processing
• Experience operating production clusters at scale using Kubernetes or similar orchestration systems

Benefits

• Competitive salary ($230K – $385K) and generous equity
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Paid parental leave and flexible PTO
• Daily meals in the office and meal delivery credits
• Annual learning and development stipend
• Relocation support for eligible employees

About the Company

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.