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Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md). --- # Software Engineer, Habitat (Online Data) - **Company:** OpenAI Inc. - **Location:** Seattle, United States - **Experience:** Experienced - **Contract:** Permanent contract - **Skills:** Artificial Intelligence, Databases, Extract Transform Load (ETL), Software Debugging, Distributed Systems, Python (Programming Language), Routing, Online Databases, Performance Tuning, Load Balancing, Caching, Indexer, Backend, Build Management, Api Design - **Published:** September 4, 2026 - **Apply:** https://startup.jobs/software-engineer-habitat-online-data-openai-7170997 ## About the Role * A strong track record building and operating high-scale backend or data-intensive distributed systems in production * Excellent systems judgment and the ability to make tradeoffs across latency, cost, correctness, and reliability * Deep care for developer experience: simple abstractions, strong defaults, guardrails, and debuggability * Comfort owning ambiguous problems end to end and driving roadmap plus execution * 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, * 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 (Rust preferred for core systems work; Python commonly used for tooling, services, and ecosystem integration) * Excellent communication skills, with the ability to build alignment and drive decisions across diverse technical and non-technical stakeholders. ## Description * Data movement, caching, routing, and placement * Privacy enforcement and access control * Change Data Capture (CDC) as a first-class primitive * The foundation for future storage backends You'll work on the core online database platform behind OpenAI's products, building and operating Habitat services that handle high-QPS, latency-sensitive workloads across regions. You'll partner closely with internal platform and product teams to ship safe, reliable systems, then push them to be faster and more cost-efficient through better caching, routing, observability, and operational tooling. This is a critical role for engineers who like owning hard distributed-systems problems end to end and sweating the details from p99 latency to production operations at massive scale. In this role, you will * 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 ## Related Videos - [Creating a routing app with Google Maps API from scratch](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/831-creating-a-routing-app-with-google-maps-api-from-scratch) - [HTTP headers that make your website go faster](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1676-http-headers-that-make-your-website-go-faster) - [Optimizing Discovery: PostgreSQL's Role in Transforming GetYourGuide's Search](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1647-optimizing-discovery-postgresql-s-role-in-transforming-getyourguide-s-search) - [Shipping Faster with Less: Render on Cloud Hosting, AI Workloads, and the Future of DevOps](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1894-shipping-faster-with-less-render-on-cloud-hosting-ai-workloads-and-the-future-of-devops) - [Reducing LLM Calls with Vector Search Patterns - Raphael De Lio (Redis)](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1714-reducing-llm-calls-with-vector-search-patterns-raphael-de-lio-redis) - [How Gatsby Cloud's real-time streaming architecture drives <5 second builds](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/418-how-gatsby-cloud-s-real-time-streaming-architecture-drives-5-second-builds) ## Related Articles - [How We Built a Worry-Free System That Runs for 10+ Years – And What We’d Do Again](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/751-how-we-built-a-worry-free-system-that-runs-for-10-years-and-what-we-d-do-again) - [Dev Digest 120 - Apple and peers](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/455-dev-digest-120-apple-and-peers) - [Dev Digest 137 - AI'm not sure about this](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/485-dev-digest-137-ai-m-not-sure-about-this) - [Navigating the AI Shift](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/629-navigating-the-ai-shift) - [Dev Digest 121 - AI goes offline](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/456-dev-digest-121-ai-goes-offline) - [Is Software Engineering Over-Saturated?](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/418-is-software-engineering-over-saturated)