Engineering Manager, Online Data Systems

OpenAI; California (MO); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking an Engineering Manager for the Online Data Systems team. You will lead a world-class infrastructure group responsible for hyperscale data storage and retrieval technologies.

You will guide delivery with strong reliability goals, drive evolution of our core in-house database and indexing technologies, and empower engineers to push the boundaries of scale and performance.

Join a mission-driven team building foundational data systems that power OpenAI's production AI applications.

Qualifications

• Experience leading data-intensive software teams in demanding environments.
• Hands-on in building and operating infrastructure with strong reliability and security.
• Deep understanding of database, indexing, storage, and distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Build, lead, and grow high-performing infrastructure engineering teams.
• Drive the evolution of OpenAI’s in-house online data technologies, our core, hyper-scale database systems, indexing technologies, and vector search.
• Anchor delivery around measurable reliability goals (SLOs, etc) to ensure system performance and resiliency is above reproach.
• Champion pragmatic use of agent technology to amplify execution velocity.
• Reduce operational toil and incident frequency through better abstractions, guardrails, and self-healing systems.

Skills

Operational excellence

Data-intensive leadership

Distributed systems

Hiring senior engineers

Database & indexing technologies

Job description

About the Team

The Online Data team builds and operates the core online database and indexing services for OpenAI’s production AI applications, including supporting the explosive growth of ChatGPT, the #1 AI app in the world, and Codex, the fastest growing agentic development toolset in the world.

Our mission is to ensure the reliability, correctness, and scalability of our online data stack and to curate a comprehensive portfolio of services that matches the relentless ambition of OpenAI, enabling our product and research teams to build 0-100 without getting bogged down in the minutiae of multi-region, multi-cloud, exabyte-scale data infrastructure.

About the Role

We are seeking an Engineering Manager to lead our Online Data Systems team, responsible for our in-house database and indexing technology. This role is about shepherding a team of world-class engineers tasked with building and operating hyperscale data storage and retrieval technology.

You’ll be overseeing the delivery of extremely challenging engineering work in areas like distributed query execution, multi-region federation, self-orchestrating and self-healing services, low-level performance optimization, and more.

There are few companies in the world building this kind of technology in-house at this scale where you’ll still be getting in on the ground floor. Instead of being a cog in the machine spending months chasing small optimizations, you’ll play a major part of shaping our future.

In this role, you will:

• Build, lead, and grow high-performing infrastructure engineering teams.
• Drive the evolution of OpenAI’s in-house online data technologies, our core, hyper-scale database systems, indexing technologies, and vector search.
• Anchor delivery around measurable reliability goals (SLOs, etc) to ensure system performance and resiliency is above reproach.
• Champion pragmatic use of agent technology to amplify execution velocity.
• Reduce operational toil and incident frequency through better abstractions, guardrails, and self-healing systems.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have a truly insatiable spirit for operational excellence, demonstrated by having your hands-on in building and operating infrastructure with strict reliability, latency, and security requirements.
• Have experience managing data-intensive software engineering teams in intense, demanding environments.
• Bring deep hands-on understanding of database, indexing, storage, and distributed systems technologies.
• Effectively modulate your technical engagement to create space for a highly technical team to lead and grow.
• Have a demonstrable track record of hiring, developing, and retaining senior engineers.

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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.