TL;DR

Software Engineer, Habitat (AI Engineering): Building and operating Habitat services that handle high-QPS, latency-sensitive workloads across regions with an accent on storage, caching, routing, CDC, and privacy enforcement. Focus on improving latency, correctness, and cost efficiency for real production workloads at massive scale, and building strong instrumentation, debugging workflows, and developer-first tooling.

Location: Seattle, US

Salary: $230K – $385K + Offers Equity

Company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.

What you will do

  • 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.

Requirements

  • 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.
  • Excellent communication skills, with the ability to build alignment and drive decisions across diverse technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice to have

  • 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.

Culture & Benefits

  • AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core.
  • Committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.
  • An equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.