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# Software Engineer, Database Systems

- **Company:** OpenAI Inc.
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA, United States
- **Experience:** Experienced
- **Salary:** $266,000.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, C++ (Programming Language), Databases, Data Systems, Software Debugging, Linux, Distributed Systems, Online Databases, Performance Tuning, Prometheus, Database Engines, System Programming, Google Cloud, Cloud Platform System, Grafana, Reliability of Systems, Indexer, Kubernetes, Infrastructure Automation Frameworks, Terraform
- **Published:** September 8, 2026
- **Apply:** https://diversityjobs.com/main/sendform/8/8/28176/1/18225597?backUrl=%2Fcareer%2F18225597%2FSoftware-Engineer-Database-Systems-California-San-Francisco

## About the Role

* 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, * 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

## Description

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


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