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OpenAIOpenAISan Francisco, CA

Software Engineer, Database Systems

Builds and optimizes high-performance distributed database systems like Rockset, focusing on ingestion, query execution, indexing, and storage. Requires 4+ years experience in scalable systems, C++ proficiency, and cloud expertise to enhance reliability and throughput at massive scale.

230k – 385k/yr
On-site4+ YOEBackend Engineering

About the role

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and operate high-performance distributed systems
  • Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks to scale infrastructure to the next order of magnitude
  • Define long-term technical direction and guide system evolution
  • Collaborate with product, engineering, and research teams to deliver scalable and reliable infrastructure
  • Dig deep into complex production issues across the stack
  • Contribute to incident response, postmortems, and best practices for system reliability

Requirements

  • 4+ years of relevant industry experience, with 2+ years leading large scale, complex projects or teams as an engineer or tech lead
  • Experience with distributed systems at scale, with a strong focus on performance, reliability, and scalability
  • Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across highly technical and cross-functional teams
  • Proficiency in a systems programming language such as C++ (our core engine is written in C++) is strongly preferred
  • Fluency in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure) and IaC tools (Terraform or similar)
  • Experience with Linux systems, CI/CD pipelines, and modern observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, etc.)

Nice-to-Haves

  • Domain knowledge in areas such as databases, data systems, storage engines, indexing, and query processing

Skills

C++Distributed SystemsKubernetesAWSGCPAzureTerraformLinuxPrometheusGrafanaCI/CDStorage EnginesIndexingQuery Processing
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