Software Engineer, Online Storage

About the Team

We are the Online Storage team powering ChatGPT, Sora, and the OpenAI APIs. We’re a growing team set up to own the databases and online‑storage infrastructure that serve all our products.

About the Role

As OpenAI scales, we’re seeking experienced, problem‑solving engineers to build robust, high‑performance, and scalable database systems. Our ability to rapidly iterate on products while ensuring reliability and speed is key to our success.

You’ll work in a fast‑paced, collaborative environment, building systems that serve hundreds of millions of users globally, with a strong emphasis on safety, reliability, and performance.

We’re hiring skilled software engineers to join the Online Storage team. You’ll help design and build a large‑scale database, collaborate with various product teams to scale it to meet their needs, and own operational excellence by defining SLAs and KPIs that directly satisfy stakeholder expectations. This is a critical role for engineers who thrive on solving complex, large‑scale challenges and are passionate about building resilient systems that perform under load.

 In this role, you will:

• Design and build highly scalable, reliable, and performant database

• Design and build highly 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

• Boost engineering productivity by building intuitive tools and systems that empower fellow developers

• Own the reliability of the systems you build, including participating in an on-call rotation to address critical incidents

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have experience building (and rebuilding) production systems to support new product capabilities and growing scale

• Care deeply about the end-user experience and take pride in solving real customer needs

• Embrace a humble, collaborative mindset and go the extra mile to support your teammates and the broader mission

• Own problems end-to-end — you're comfortable learning on the fly to fill gaps and get things done

• Build internal tools that improve workflows when off-the-shelf solutions fall short

• Have hands-on experience with distributed systems such as data storage, caching, search, or other backend infrastructure components

• Prioritize the reliability, scalability, and performance of large-scale systems

• Thrive in ambiguous, fast-paced environments and enjoy iterating rapidly on product and research initiatives

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, with a focus 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 areas such as databases, large-scale data systems, storage, caching, search, or other core components of distributed infrastructure

• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to build consensus across diverse technical and non-technical stakeholders

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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 we 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.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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