Software Engineer, Habitat (Online Data)
Seattle • FullTime
Posted 1y ago
About the job
Online Data builds and operates Habitat, a core online database platform for OpenAI's products. This system handles high-QPS, latency-sensitive workloads across regions, with end-to-end ownership of provisioning, developer experience, APIs, scaling, reliability, data movement, privacy enforcement, and future storage backends. The role involves designing and building core abstractions, owning major surface areas, improving performance and cost efficiency, and building developer-first tooling. You will collaborate closely with internal teams, participate in on-call rotations, and focus on solving complex distributed systems problems at massive scale.
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.
Requirements
- 8+ years of industry experience building production software.
- 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).
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to build alignment and drive decisions across diverse technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- A strong track record building and operating high-scale backend or data-intensive distributed systems in production.
- Excellent systems judgment and the ability to make tradeoffs across latency, cost, correctness, and reliability.
- Deep care for developer experience: simple abstractions, strong defaults, guardrails, and debuggability.
- Comfort owning ambiguous problems end to end and driving roadmap plus execution.
- Experience in one or more of: databases, caching systems, routing and load balancing, indexing and retrieval, CDC pipelines.
- Deep experience with tail latency and global performance optimization (p95, p99, request steering, locality).
- Experience designing platform APIs consumed by many internal teams.
- Experience with multi-region systems, consistency semantics, and failover design.