Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Senior Software Engineer role sits at a foundational layer of an AI-driven SaaS ecosystem: acquiring and moving large-scale external data into systems that power downstream model training and product capabilities. Work spanning crawling, ingestion, indexing, and search maps closely to the “data supply chain” concerns that many SaaS companies face as they expand features that rely on fresh, high-volume inputs and reliable retrieval.
For a SaaS career, the standout value is breadth across platform engineering disciplines that recur in modern cloud products. Ownership of distributed systems handling very large datasets, paired with Kubernetes and Infrastructure-as-Code practices, builds fluency in reliability, operability, and cost-aware scaling. The listing also signals cross-functional exposure, including coordination with data processing and architecture groups, plus practical engagement with privacy and compliance workflows that increasingly shape how SaaS teams ship data-centric features.
This position tends to suit senior engineers who prefer end-to-end accountability for infrastructure-heavy services rather than narrow feature delivery. It aligns with professionals who enjoy systems design, performance investigation through experimentation, and collaboration across multiple technical stakeholders while keeping a clear line of sight to production constraints.
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
Senior Software Engineer, Data Acquisition
Overview:
The Data Acquisition team within the Foundations organization at OpenAI is responsible for all aspects of data collection to support our model training operations. Our team manages web crawling and GPTBot services and works closely with Data Processing, Architecture, and Scaling teams. We are looking for a skilled Senior Software Engineer to join our Data Acquisition team.
Responsibilities:
Own and lead engineering projects in the area of data acquisition including web crawling, data ingestion, and search.
Collaborate with other sub-teams, such as Data Processing, Architecture, and Scaling, to ensure smooth data flow and system operability.
Work closely with the legal team to handle any compliance or data privacy-related matters.
Develop and deploy highly scalable distributed systems capable of handling petabytes of data.
Architect and implement algorithms for data indexing and search capabilities.
Build and maintain backend services for data storage, including work with key-value databases and synchronization.
Deploy solutions in a Kubernetes Infrastructure-as-Code environment and perform routine system checks.
Conduct and analyze experiments on data to provide insights into system performance.
Qualifications:
BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or a related field.
6+ years of industry experience in software development.
Experience with large web crawlers a plus
Strong expertise in large stateful distributed systems and data processing.
Proficiency in Kubernetes, and Infrastructure-as-Code concepts.
Willingness and enthusiasm for trying new approaches and technologies.
Ability to handle multiple tasks and adapt to changing priorities.
Strong communication skills, both written and verbal.
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.
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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.
