Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Data Engineer, Analytics role is featured because it sits at a core SaaS leverage point: turning product and user event data into trusted datasets that inform both product decisions and risk controls. The remit spans analytics foundations and operational safeguards, a combination that reflects how modern SaaS businesses increasingly rely on instrumentation and governance alongside growth measurement. The cross-functional surface area described, including work that supports safety systems, signals a data function embedded in day-to-day product deployment rather than a back-office reporting lane.
From a SaaS career perspective, the work emphasizes durable competencies: building canonical tables, designing fault-tolerant ingestion, and shaping warehouse-ready pipelines that multiple teams depend on. Experience with common orchestration and distributed processing patterns translates across SaaS companies that run on event streams, experimentation, and metric-driven iteration. The proximity to research and model training also points to exposure to data quality and lineage pressures that are becoming standard in AI-enabled SaaS stacks.
This role tends to fit engineers who prefer owning foundational data assets and partnering broadly to define what “correct” means for key metrics. It will suit someone comfortable balancing reliability, security, and analytical usability, and who values clear interfaces between engineering, product, and decision-making stakeholders. On-site expectations also make it a match for professionals who do their best work with frequent in-person collaboration.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the team
The Applied team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to consumers and businesses.
We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth.
About the role:
We're seeking a Data Engineer to take the lead in building our data pipelines and core tables for OpenAI. These pipelines are crucial for powering analyses, safety systems that guide business decisions, product growth, and prevent bad actors. If you're passionate about working with data and are eager to create solutions with significant impact, we'd love to hear from you. This role also provides the opportunity to collaborate closely with the researchers behind ChatGPT and help them train new models to deliver to users. As we continue our rapid growth, we value data-driven insights, and your contributions will play a pivotal role in our trajectory. Join us in shaping the future of OpenAI!
In this role, you will:
Design, build and manage our data pipelines, ensuring all user event data is seamlessly integrated into our data warehouse.
Develop canonical datasets to track key product metrics including user growth, engagement, and revenue.
Work collaboratively with various teams, including, Infrastructure, Data Science, Product, Marketing, Finance, and Research to understand their data needs and provide solutions.
Implement robust and fault-tolerant systems for data ingestion and processing.
Participate in data architecture and engineering decisions, bringing your strong experience and knowledge to bear.
Ensure the security, integrity, and compliance of data according to industry and company standards.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have 3+ years of experience as a data engineer and 8+ years of any software engineering experience(including data engineering).
Proficiency in at least one programming language commonly used within Data Engineering, such as Python, Scala, or Java.
Experience with distributed processing technologies and frameworks, such as Hadoop, Flink and distributed storage systems (e.g., HDFS, S3).
Expertise with any of ETL schedulers such as Airflow, Dagster, Prefect or similar frameworks.
Solid understanding of Spark and ability to write, debug and optimize Spark code.
This role is exclusively based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.
We are 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.
For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy
At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
