Distributed Systems Engineer - High-Performance DB Core

OpenAI; San Francisco, Mountain View (CA, CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a distributed systems engineer to join the Database Systems team, contributing to the Rockset-powered real-time storage, indexing, and query engine. You will optimize performance, scale infrastructure, and guide system evolution across ingestion, query execution, and storage.

You will collaborate with product, research, and engineering teams in a fast-paced environment, operating production clusters and driving reliable, low-latency systems at scale.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of industry experience, with 2+ years leading large scale, complex projects or teams as an engineer or tech lead.
• Experience with distributed systems at scale, with a strong focus on performance, reliability, and scalability.
• Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across highly technical and cross-functional teams.
• Proficiency in a systems programming language such as C++ (our core engine is written in C++) is strongly preferred.
• Fluency in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure) and IaC tools (Terraform or similar).
• Experience with Linux systems, CI/CD pipelines, and modern observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, etc.).
• Domain knowledge in areas such as databases, data systems, storage engines, indexing, and query processing is a plus but not required

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

Skills

Distributed systems

C++

Performance optimization

Cloud environments

Linux

CI/CD

Observability tools

Kubernetes

Team collaboration

Tools

Terraform

Prometheus

Grafana

Job description

OpenAI is seeking a distributed systems engineer to join the Database Systems team, contributing to the Rockset-powered real-time storage, indexing, and query engine. You will optimize performance, scale infrastructure, and guide system evolution across ingestion, query execution, and storage.

You will collaborate with product, research, and engineering teams in a fast-paced environment, operating production clusters and driving reliable, low-latency systems at scale.