Software Engineer, Habitat (Online Data)

Highlights

• Build Habitat, the system of record for OpenAI's online user data at massive scale.
• Own high-QPS, latency-sensitive database platform spanning regions end to end.
• Drive caching, routing, and CDC primitives for OpenAI's core products.

What they offer

• equity

Ideal candidate

Senior distributed-systems builder who loves owning ambiguous, high-scale platforms end to end and sweats p99 latency, reliability, and developer experience.

Requirements

• 8+ years building production software, including 3+ years leading large-scale complex projects as tech lead or senior IC
• Track record building and operating high-scale backend or data-intensive distributed systems in production
• Excellent systems judgment across latency, cost, correctness, and reliability tradeoffs
• Experience with 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 and locality
• Experience designing platform APIs consumed by many internal teams
• Experience with multi-region systems, consistency semantics, and failover design
• Proficiency in Rust and/or Python, with Rust preferred for core systems work
• Excellent communication skills with ability to build alignment across stakeholders