Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Software Engineer role sits at a platform layer that many SaaS businesses eventually need but few build well: a shared system of record for online user data with consistent APIs, guardrails, and operational ownership. Habitat is positioned as an internal “single product surface,” which signals a mature, multi-team environment where data infrastructure is treated as a product and must serve diverse workloads across regions with tight latency expectations.
From a SaaS career standpoint, the work maps directly to the problems that emerge at scale: balancing reliability, cost, and correctness while evolving interfaces that other teams depend on. Ownership across provisioning, caching, routing, CDC, and privacy enforcement builds a strong foundation in platform engineering, including the less visible disciplines that differentiate durable SaaS systems such as observability, incident response, and performance tuning at the tail.
The listing points to a fit for engineers who prefer end to end accountability over narrow feature delivery, and who enjoy making pragmatic tradeoffs under real production constraints. It also suits candidates motivated by internal customer empathy, since success is measured by how well other product and infrastructure teams can build on the platform without sacrificing safety or speed.
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
Online Data builds and operates Habitat, the single product surface of Online Data and the system of record for OpenAI’s online user data. As OpenAI’s scale and product requirements evolve, Habitat is becoming a full-stack, one-size-fits-most database platform with end-to-end ownership of:
Provisioning and developer experience
APIs and guardrails
Scaling, performance, and reliability
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
You might thrive in this role if you have
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
Qualifications
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.
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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