Software Engineer, Online Storage

Employment Type

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Full time

Department

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Applied AI

Compensation

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• $255K – $405K • 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 for eligible employees and 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 and safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked)
• 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.

More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.

This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.

About the Team

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We are the Online Storage team powering ChatGPT, Sora, and the OpenAI APIs. We’re a growing team set up to own the databases and online‑storage infrastructure that serve all our products.

About the Role

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As OpenAI scales, we’re seeking experienced, problem‑solving engineers to build robust, high‑performance, and scalable database systems. Our ability to rapidly iterate on products while ensuring reliability and speed is key to our success.

You’ll work in a fast‑paced, collaborative environment, building systems that serve hundreds of millions of users globally, with a strong emphasis on safety, reliability, and performance.

We’re hiring skilled software engineers to join the Online Storage team. You’ll help design and build a large‑scale database, collaborate with various product teams to scale it to meet their needs, and own operational excellence by defining SLAs and KPIs that directly satisfy stakeholder expectations. This is a critical role for engineers who thrive on solving complex, large‑scale challenges and are passionate about building resilient systems that perform under load.

In this role, you will:

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• Design and build highly scalable, reliable, and performant database
• Design and build highly simple and intuitive APIs for the underlying database
• Analyze and resolve performance and scalability bottlenecks to improve overall system efficiency
• Debug, instrument, and fix system issues — from pinpointing root causes to delivering long-term solutions
• Define technical strategy and guide the development of robust infrastructure that supports high-scale production systems and evolving business needs
• Collaborate closely with product teams to deeply understand requirements and deliver impactful solutions
• Boost engineering productivity by building intuitive tools and systems that empower fellow developers
• Own the reliability of the systems you build, including participating in an on-call rotation to address critical incidents

You might thrive in this role if you:

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• Have experience building (and rebuilding) production systems to support new product capabilities and growing scale
• Care deeply about the end-user experience and take pride in solving real customer needs
• Embrace a humble, collaborative mindset and go the extra mile to support your teammates and the broader mission
• Own problems end-to-end — you're comfortable learning on the fly to fill gaps and get things done
• Build internal tools that improve workflows when off-the-shelf solutions fall short
• Have hands-on experience with distributed systems such as data storage, caching, search, or other backend infrastructure components
• Prioritize the reliability, scalability, and performance of large-scale systems
• Thrive in ambiguous, fast-paced environments and enjoy iterating rapidly on product and research initiatives

Qualifications:

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• 4+ years of industry experience, including 2+ years leading large-scale, complex projects or technical initiatives as an engineer or tech lead
• Strong passion for building distributed systems at scale, with a focus on reliability, scalability, security, and continuous improvement
• Expertise in systems programming, with hands-on experience in multi-threading and concurrency; proficiency in C++ and/or Python is highly preferred
• Preferably, domain experience in areas such as databases, large-scale data systems, storage, caching, search, or other core components of distributed infrastructure
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to build consensus across diverse technical and non-technical stakeholders