Software Engineer, Database Systems · OpenAI

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 18:24:14 GMT
Engineering

OpenAI · San Francisco · $230K – $385K • Offers Equity · onsite

Software Engineer, Database Systems

Location

San Francisco

Employment Type

Full time

Department

Applied AI

Compensation

$230K – $385K • Offers Equity

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.

Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts

Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)

401(k) retirement plan with employer match

Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)

Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees

13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)

Mental health and wellness support

Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage

Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth

Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible

Relocation support for eligible employees

Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

About the Team:

The Database Systems team specializes in high-performance distributed databases. Our team built Rockset, the real-time search, analytics, and vector database that powers all vector search and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) at OpenAI. In addition to retrieval, as an online database, Rockset powers core functionality across all of OpenAI's product lines and many critical internal use cases.

About the Role:

We are looking for engineers passionate about distributed systems, close-to-the-metal performance optimization (our core engine is written in C++), and building scalable database infrastructure from the ground up. As an engineer on the Database Systems team, you'll contribute to the core database engine, driving improvements across ingestion, query execution, indexing, and storage. You'll partner with teams across OpenAI to unlock new product capabilities and help scale online database reliability and throughput as usage grows by orders of magnitude.

In this role you will:

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

You might thrive in this role if you:

Have significant experience building, scaling, and optimizing distributed systems at scale

Are curious about database internals, storage engines, or low-latency query systems

Enjoy debugging challenging performance issues in complex, high-throughput systems

Have experience operating production clusters at scale (e.g., Kubernetes or other orchestration systems)

Think rigorously about scalability, correctness, and reliability

Thrive in fast-paced environments with high autonomy and impact

Qualifications:

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++ (our core engine is written in C++) is strongly preferred

Fluency in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure) and IaC tools (Terraform or similar)

Experience with Linux systems, CI/CD pipelines, and modern observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, etc.)

Domain knowledge in areas such as databases, data systems, storage engines, indexing, and query processing is a plus but not required

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.