OpenAI· Applied AI Engineering· Seattle
Software Engineer, Habitat (Online Data)
Comp$230K – $385K
Classified Tasks (19)
Automate 0%Augment 84%Human-Only 16%
Augment (16)
AI assists, human decides
Design and build core abstractions spanning storage, caching, routing, CDC, and privacy enforcement
technical
Build and operate Habitat services that handle high‑QPS, latency‑sensitive workloads across regions
technical
Improve latency, correctness, and cost efficiency for production workloads at massive scale
technical
Develop and maintain APIs and guardrails for the online data platform
technical
Implement and operate data movement, caching, routing, and placement systems
operational
Design, implement, and maintain Change Data Capture (CDC) pipelines as a first‑class primitive
technical
Implement privacy enforcement and access control mechanisms for user data
technical
Develop the foundation and interfaces for future storage backends
technical
Build strong instrumentation, debugging workflows, and developer‑first tooling
technical
Optimize systems for tail latency (p95/p99), global performance, request steering, and locality
technical
Improve observability and operational tooling to increase performance and reduce operational costs
operational
Provision and enhance developer experience, including defaults, guardrails, and debuggability
operational
Drive scaling, performance, and reliability improvements across the platform
operational
Design and operate platform APIs consumed by multiple internal teams
technical
Push deployed systems to be faster and more cost‑efficient through better caching, routing, observability, and operational tooling
operational
Manage multi‑region consistency semantics and failover design in production systems
technical
Human-Only (3)
Requires human judgment
Own a major Habitat surface area end to end, including product and API design, provisioning, and operational excellence
leadership
Collaborate with internal product and infrastructure teams to gather requirements and ship pragmatic solutions
communication
Participate in on‑call rotation to respond to incidents and improve system reliability
operational
Job description
Software Engineer, Habitat (Online Data) | OpenAI Careers ## Software Engineer, Habitat (Online Data) Applied AI Engineering - Seattle Apply now(opens in a new window) ## **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 val