Software Engineer, Habitat (Online Data)

The role

You will build and operate Habitat, a core online database platform for OpenAI. You will design abstractions for storage, caching, routing, and privacy enforcement to handle high-QPS, latency-sensitive workloads.

What you will do

• 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
• Participate in an on-call rotation

Required qualifications

• 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
• Proficiency in Rust and/or Python
• Excellent communication skills

Nice to have

• Rust preferred for core systems work
• 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

Before you apply

• Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law

About the company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.