Software Engineer, Database Systems

OpenAI; California (MO); On-site; USD 170,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI's Database Systems team seeks engineers for high-performance distributed databases and scalable infrastructure. The core engine is C++, focusing on ingestion, query execution, indexing, and storage, with Rockset powering real-time search and RAG at OpenAI.

You’ll help scale online database reliability and throughput as usage grows across OpenAI products. You will design, build, and operate distributed systems, identify bottlenecks, guide long-term direction, and collaborate across teams

Qualifications

• 4+ years of relevant industry experience with 2+ years leading large-scale projects or teams.
• Experience with distributed systems at scale, focusing on performance and reliability.
• Strong communication and collaboration across technical teams.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate high-performance distributed systems.
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks to scale infrastructure.
• Define long-term technical direction and guide system evolution.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, and research teams to deliver scalable infrastructure.
• Investigate complex production issues across the stack and drive reliability.
• Contribute to incident response, postmortems, and best practices for reliability.

Skills

Distributed systems

C++

Performance optimization

Cloud environments

Kubernetes

Linux

CI/CD

Observability

Team leadership

Tools

Terraform

Job description

About the Team:

The Database Systems team specializes in high-performance distributed databases. Our team built Rockset, the real-time search, analytics, and vector database that powers all vector search and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) at OpenAI. In addition to retrieval, as an online database, Rockset powers core functionality across all of OpenAI's product lines and many critical internal use cases.

About the Role:

We are looking for engineers passionate about distributed systems, close-to-the-metal performance optimization (our core engine is written in C++), and building scalable database infrastructure from the ground up. As an engineer on the Database Systems team, you'll contribute to the core database engine, driving improvements across ingestion, query execution, indexing, and storage. You'll partner with teams across OpenAI to unlock new product capabilities and help scale online database reliability and throughput as usage grows by orders of magnitude.

In this role you will:

• 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

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have significant experience building, scaling, and optimizing distributed systems at scale

• Are curious about database internals, storage engines, or low-latency query systems

• Enjoy debugging challenging performance issues in complex, high-throughput systems

• Have experience operating production clusters at scale (e.g., Kubernetes or other orchestration systems)

• Think rigorously about scalability, correctness, and reliability

• Thrive in fast-paced environments with high autonomy and impact

Qualifications:

• 4+ years of relevant 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

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 Affi

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.

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