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. 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. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy
At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
