Software Engineer, Database Systems
San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 1y ago
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
Applied AI Engineer
About the job
We are seeking engineers passionate about distributed systems, close-to-the-metal performance optimization, 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.
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 and reliable infrastructure
- Debug complex production issues across the stack
- Contribute to incident response, postmortems, and best practices for system reliability
Requirements
- Significant experience building, scaling, and optimizing distributed systems
- Curiosity about database internals, storage engines, or low-latency query systems
- Enjoy debugging challenging performance issues in complex, high-throughput systems
- Experience operating production clusters at scale (e.g., Kubernetes or other orchestration systems)
- Rigorous thinking about scalability, correctness, and reliability
- Thrive in fast-paced environments with high autonomy and impact
- 4+ years of relevant industry experience, with 2+ years leading large scale, complex projects or teams
- Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across highly technical and cross-functional teams
- Proficiency in a systems programming language such as C++
- 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.)