Senior Backend Engineer – High-Scale Distributed Systems

OpenAI; Washington; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking an experienced engineer to own a major surface area of Habitat, the online data platform powering OpenAI’s products. You will design and build core abstractions for storage, caching, routing, CDC, and privacy, and work end-to-end from API design to production operations.

You will partner with product and infrastructure teams to ship safe, reliable systems, improve latency and cost efficiency, and own on-call reliability and monitoring at scale.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of industry experience building production software, including 3+ years leading large-scale, complex projects or technical initiatives as a tech lead or senior IC
• Strong passion for building distributed systems at scale, with a focus on reliability, scalability, security, and continuous improvement
• Proficiency in Rust and/or Python (Rust preferred for core systems work; Python commonly used for tooling, services, and ecosystem integration)
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to build alignment and drive decisions across diverse technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Design and build core abstractions spanning storage, caching, routing, CDC, and privacy enforcement
• Own a major surface area end to end, from product and API design to operational excellence
• Improve latency, correctness, and cost efficiency for real production workloads at massive scale
• Build strong instrumentation, debugging workflows, and developer-first tooling
• Collaborate closely with internal product and infrastructure teams to understand requirements and ship pragmatic solutions
• Participate in an on-call rotation and raise the bar on reliability while aggressively improving performance and usability

Skills

Backend systems

Distributed systems

Rust

Python

Latency optimization

On-call rotation

Job description

OpenAI is seeking an experienced engineer to own a major surface area of Habitat, the online data platform powering OpenAI’s products. You will design and build core abstractions for storage, caching, routing, CDC, and privacy, and work end-to-end from API design to production operations.

You will partner with product and infrastructure teams to ship safe, reliable systems, improve latency and cost efficiency, and own on-call reliability and monitoring at scale.