OpenAI
Software Engineer, Database Systems
$266K–$445K
San Francisco +1 · Full-time · Posted Jul 29, 2025
- Location
- San Francisco
Mountain View - Experience
- 4+ years of relevant industry experience, including 2+ years leading large-scale, complex projects or teams as an engineer or tech lead.
About the job
Build and operate the distributed database engine and infrastructure powering OpenAI’s products, improving performance, reliability, and scalability.
What you'll do
- Design, build, and operate high-performance distributed systems; improve ingestion, query execution, indexing, and storage.
- Find and resolve performance bottlenecks, complex production issues, and reliability problems; contribute to incident response and postmortems.
- Set technical direction and collaborate across product, engineering, and research teams to deliver scalable infrastructure.
What they ask for
- Experience with distributed systems at scale, focused on performance, reliability, and scalability.
- Fluency in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure) and IaC tools (Terraform or similar).
- Experience with Linux systems, CI/CD pipelines, and modern observability stacks.
- Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across technical and cross-functional teams.
Nice to have
- Proficiency in a systems programming language such as C++ is strongly preferred.
- Database, data systems, storage engine, indexing, or query processing knowledge is a plus but not required.
Pay
$266K – $445K (USD, base salary)
Tools
C++, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Azure, Terraform, Linux, Prometheus
AI focus
Build and improve the database powering vector search and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) at OpenAI.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative