Software Engineer, Database Systems jobs in United States
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OpenAI · 2 days ago

Software Engineer, Database Systems

positionSan Francisco, CA
timeFull-time
remoteOnsite
seniorityMid, Senior Level
money$255K/yr - $405K/yr
date4+ years exp

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The role focuses on designing, building, and operating high-performance distributed systems, contributing to the core database engine, and collaborating with various teams to enhance online database reliability and throughput.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)Generative AIMachine LearningNatural Language ProcessingSaaS
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Growth Opportunities
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H1B Sponsor Likelynote

Responsibilities

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

Qualification

Distributed systemsC++Cloud environmentsLinux systemsCI/CD pipelinesObservability stacksCommunicationCollaboration skills

Required

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.)

Preferred

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

Company

OpenAI

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OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company that develops advanced AI models, including ChatGPT. It is a sub-organization of OpenAI Foundation.
dateFounded in 2015
location
San Francisco, California, USA
people-size201-500 employees
web-link
https://www.openai.com

H1B Sponsorship

OpenAI has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (1)
2024 (1)
2023 (1)
2022 (18)
2021 (10)
2020 (6)

Funding

Current Stage
Growth Stage
Total Funding
$79B
Key Investors
The Walt Disney CompanySoftBankThrive Capital
2025-12-11Corporate Round· $1B
2025-10-02Secondary Market· $6.6B
2025-03-31Series Unknown· $40B

Leadership Team

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Sam Altman
CEO & Co-Founder
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Greg Brockman
President, Chairman, & Co-Founder
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Company data provided by crunchbase