Software Engineer

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 to operational excellence
• Improve latency, correctness, and cost efficiency for real production workloads at massive scale
• Build strong instrumentation, debugging workflows, and developer-first tooling
• Collaborate closely with internal product and infrastructure teams to understand requirements and ship pragmatic solutions
• Participate in an on-call rotation and raise the bar on reliability while aggressively improving performance and usability

Requirements

• 8+ years of industry experience building production software
• 3+ years leading large-scale, complex projects or technical initiatives
• Proficiency in Rust and/or Python
• Strong track record building and operating high-scale backend or data-intensive distributed systems
• Experience with multi-region systems, consistency semantics, and failover design
• Experience designing platform APIs consumed by many internal teams

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep experience with tail latency and global performance optimization (p95, p99, request steering, locality)
• Experience in databases, caching systems, routing and load balancing, indexing and retrieval, or CDC pipelines
• Excellent systems judgment regarding tradeoffs between latency, cost, correctness, and reliability

About the Company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.