Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Engineering Manager role sits at the intersection of SaaS product delivery and foundational platform engineering, focused on the online data systems that underpin production AI applications. Within the SaaS ecosystem, that combination matters because database, indexing, and retrieval layers increasingly define product reliability and user experience, especially when usage patterns change quickly and workloads span regions and clouds.
For a SaaS career, the role offers durable exposure to the mechanics of operating core services as products: setting and meeting reliability targets, reducing operational toil, and evolving internal platforms that multiple teams depend on. Experience leading work across distributed query execution, federation, and performance tuning tends to transfer well to other SaaS organisations building multi-tenant, latency-sensitive systems where platform decisions compound over time.
This position is best suited to an engineering leader who stays close enough to the technical details to guide architecture and tradeoffs, while creating space for senior engineers to execute. It will fit someone who prefers measurable operational outcomes, enjoys shaping internal service portfolios, and is comfortable balancing delivery with long-horizon platform investments in a production environment.
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 Online Data team builds and operates the core online database and indexing services for OpenAI’s production AI applications, including supporting the explosive growth of ChatGPT, the #1 AI app in the world, and Codex, the fastest growing agentic development toolset in the world.
Our mission is to ensure the reliability, correctness, and scalability of our online data stack and to curate a comprehensive portfolio of services that matches the relentless ambition of OpenAI, enabling our product and research teams to build 0-100 without getting bogged down in the minutiae of multi-region, multi-cloud, exabyte-scale data infrastructure.
About the Role
We are seeking an Engineering Manager to lead our Online Data Systems team, responsible for our in-house database and indexing technology. This role is about shepherding a team of world-class engineers tasked with building and operating hyperscale data storage and retrieval technology.
You’ll be overseeing the delivery of extremely challenging engineering work in areas like distributed query execution, multi-region federation, self-orchestrating and self-healing services, low-level performance optimization, and more.
There are few companiesin the world building this kind of technology in-house at this scale where you’ll still be getting in on the ground floor. Instead of being a cog in the machine spending months chasing small optimizations, you’ll play a major part of shaping our future.
In this role, you will:
Drive the evolution of OpenAI’s in-house online data technologies, our core, hyper-scale database systems, indexing technologies, and vector search.
Anchor delivery around measurable reliability goals (SLOs, etc) to ensure system performance and resiliency is above reproach.
Champion pragmatic use of agent technology to amplify execution velocity.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have a truly insatiable spirit for operational excellence, demonstrated by having your hands-on in building and operating infrastructure with strict reliability, latency, and security requirements.
Have experience managing data-intensive software engineering teams in intense, demanding environments.
Bring deep hands-on understanding of database, indexing, storage, and distributed systems technologies.
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.
