Software Engineer, Database Systems at OpenAI

San Francisco, California, United States

OpenAI Logo
$255,000 – $405,000Compensation
Mid-level (3 to 4 years), Senior (5 to 8 years)Experience Level
Full TimeJob Type
UnknownVisa
Artificial Intelligence, TechnologyIndustries

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++ (strongly preferred)
  • Domain knowledge in areas such as databases, data systems, storage engines, indexing, and query processing (a plus but not required)
  • Significant experience building, scaling, and optimizing distributed systems at scale
  • Curiosity about database internals, storage engines, or low-latency query systems
  • Enjoyment of debugging challenging performance issues in complex, high-throughput systems
  • Rigorous thinking about scalability, correctness, and reliability
  • Thriving in fast-paced environments with high autonomy and impact

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
  • Contribute to the core database engine, driving improvements across ingestion, query execution, indexing, and storage
  • Partner with teams across OpenAI to unlock new product capabilities and help scale online database reliability and throughput

Skills

C++
Distributed Systems
Database Internals
Performance Optimization
Query Execution
Indexing
Storage Engines
Ingestion
Scalability
Reliability Engineering
Incident Response
Vector Databases
RAG

OpenAI

Develops safe and beneficial AI technologies

About OpenAI

OpenAI develops and deploys artificial intelligence technologies aimed at benefiting humanity. The company creates advanced AI models capable of performing various tasks, such as automating processes and enhancing creativity. OpenAI's products, like Sora, allow users to generate videos from text descriptions, showcasing the versatility of its AI applications. Unlike many competitors, OpenAI operates under a capped profit model, which limits the profits it can make and ensures that excess earnings are redistributed to maximize the social benefits of AI. This commitment to safety and ethical considerations is central to its mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) serves all of humanity.

San Francisco, CaliforniaHeadquarters
2015Year Founded
$18,433.2MTotal Funding
LATE_VCCompany Stage
AI & Machine LearningIndustries
1,001-5,000Employees

Benefits

Health insurance
Dental and vision insurance
Flexible spending account for healthcare and dependent care
Mental healthcare service
Fertility treatment coverage
401(k) with generous matching
20-week paid parental leave
Life insurance (complimentary)
AD&D insurance (complimentary)
Short-term/long-term disability insurance (complimentary)
Optional buy-up life insurance
Flexible work hours and unlimited paid time off (we encourage 4+ weeks per year)
Annual learning & development stipend
Regular team happy hours and outings
Daily catered lunch and dinner
Travel to domestic conferences

Risks

Elon Musk's legal battle may pose financial and reputational challenges for OpenAI.
Customizable ChatGPT personas could lead to privacy and ethical concerns.
Competitors like Anthropic raising capital may intensify market competition.

Differentiation

OpenAI's capped profit model prioritizes ethical AI development over unlimited profit.
OpenAI's AI models, like Sora, offer unique video creation from text descriptions.
OpenAI's focus on AGI aims to create AI systems smarter than humans.

Upsides

OpenAI's $6.6 billion funding boosts its AI research and computational capacity.
Customizable ChatGPT personas enhance user engagement and satisfaction.
OpenAI's 'Operator' AI agent could revolutionize workforce automation by 2025.

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