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 YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU HAVE - A 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 QUALIFICATIONS - 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. 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, dis