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. As OpenAI’s scale and product requirements evolve, Habitat is becoming 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

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. This is a critical role for engineers who like owning hard distributed-systems problems end to end and sweating the details from p99 latency to production operations at massive scale.

In this role, you will

• 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

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 Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

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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