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OpenAIOpenAISeattle, WA

Software Engineer, Habitat (Online Data)

Builds and operates Habitat, OpenAI's core online database platform handling high-QPS, latency-sensitive workloads. Owns end-to-end distributed systems for storage, caching, routing, CDC, and privacy; requires 8+ years experience with Rust/Python expertise.

230k – 385k
On-site8+ YOEData Engineering

About the role

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

  • 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
  • 8+ years of industry experience building production software, including 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; Python commonly used for tooling, services, and ecosystem integration)
  • Excellent communication skills, with the ability to build alignment and drive decisions across diverse technical and non-technical stakeholders

Skills

RustPythonDistributed SystemsDatabasesCachingRoutingCdcPrivacy EnforcementAPIsObservability

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