Software Engineer, Habitat (Online Data)

About The Team

Online Data builds and operates Habitat, the single product surface of Online Data and the system of record for OpenAI’s online user data. Habitat is evolving into a full-stack, one-size-fits-most database platform with end-to-end ownership of: Provisioning and developer experience, APIs and guardrails, Scaling, performance, and reliability, Data movement, caching, routing, and placement, Privacy enforcement and access control, Change Data Capture (CDC) as a first-class primitive. The foundation for future storage backends.

Responsibilities

You’ll work on the core online database platform behind OpenAI’s products, building and operating Habitat services that handle high-QPS, latency-sensitive workloads across regions. You’ll partner closely with internal platform and product teams to ship safe, reliable systems, then push them to be faster and more cost-efficient through better caching, routing, observability, and operational tooling.

Qualifications

• 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
• Experience designing platform APIs consumed by many internal teams
• Experience with multi-region systems, consistency semantics, and failover design

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.