Software Engineer, Database Systems

About this role

Join OpenAI's Database Systems team to design and optimize the high-performance distributed database infrastructure powering vector search and RAG across the company. You'll work on the core C++ engine, tackle production scalability challenges, and collaborate with teams across OpenAI to unlock new product capabilities.

What you'll do

• Design and build high-performance distributed systems for database ingestion, query execution, indexing, and storage
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks to scale infrastructure by orders of magnitude
• Define long-term technical direction and guide system evolution
• Debug complex production issues and contribute to incident response and postmortems
• Collaborate with product, engineering, and research teams on scalable infrastructure
• Operate production clusters and ensure system reliability and throughput

What they're looking for

• C++ and systems programming
• Distributed systems design and optimization at scale
• Database internals, storage engines, and query processing
• Performance debugging in high-throughput systems
• Production cluster orchestration (Kubernetes or similar)
• Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and Infrastructure as Code
• Linux systems and CI/CD pipelines
• Observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana)