---
title: 'Software Engineer, Habitat (Online Data) at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-habitat-online-data-openai-seattle-baxbd0pcqd6n'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Software Engineer, Habitat (Online Data) at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** Seattle, WA
- **Compensation:** $266k–$445k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2025-04-14
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/460b4295-3803-4dda-983d-3b0fea0b0fc4/application

**Skills:** Rust, Python, Distributed Systems, Database Systems, Caching Systems, Routing, Load Balancing, Indexing and Retrieval, Change Data Capture (CDC), Performance Optimization, Global Performance Optimization, API Design

> Design and build core abstractions for OpenAI's online user data platform, Habitat. The role involves optimizing latency, cost, and reliability for high-scale distributed systems, focusing on storage, caching, routing, and privacy enforcement while collaborating with cross-functional teams.

## 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](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf). 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](https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA). 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](https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241). [OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf) 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.

## About OpenAI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.
- **Entity Type**: Private – structured as a nonprofit parent (OpenAI Foundation) governing a for-profit public benefit corporation (OpenAI Group). The company has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, signaling a potential future IPO.
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and others

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence research and deployment
- **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises via API and platform), B2C (ChatGPT users), and developers (API, open-source models)
- **Mission**: To ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity.

## Products & Services
- **[ChatGPT](https://openai.com/chatgpt)**: Conversational AI assistant available via web and mobile, used by consumers and integrated into enterprise workflows.
- **[GPT-4 API](https://openai.com/product)**: Large language model accessed via API for developers to build AI-powered applications (text generation, summarization, code assistance, etc.).
- **[DALL-E](https://openai.com/dall-e-3)**: Image generation model that creates images from natural language descriptions.
- **[Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper)**: Open-source speech recognition system.
- **[OpenAI Agents](https://openai.com/)**: Emerging product category focused on autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks on behalf of users (announced June 2026).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed in the provided sources. Widely reported in the press at ~$300 billion as of early 2026 (post-funding round), but this figure is not confirmed by OpenAI’s official materials.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding exceeds $13 billion from Microsoft and other investors. The company has also confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC (see [openai.com](https://openai.com/) – “Confidential submission of draft S-1”).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Microsoft (strategic partner and largest investor), with additional participation from Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others.
- **Growth Signals**: Active hiring with 721 open roles posted; expansion into agent-based products; confidential IPO filing; continued deployment of frontier models.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover & brand recognition**: ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, establishing OpenAI as the household name in generative AI.
- **Research leadership**: Consistently publishes cutting-edge research (GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Whisper, etc.) and attracts top AI talent.
- **Compute & infrastructure**: Exclusive partnership with Microsoft provides massive cloud computing resources (Azure) for training and inference.
- **Unique governance structure**: The nonprofit parent ensures mission alignment (AGI benefiting humanity) while the for-profit arm can raise capital and scale products.

## Strategic Focus
- **Safe AGI development**: Continued emphasis on safety research, alignment, and responsible deployment (e.g., safety systems, model provenance).
- **Enterprise expansion**: Growing ChatGPT Enterprise and API offerings for businesses.
- **Agentic AI**: Building autonomous agents that can “transform work” (announced June 2026).
- **IPO preparation**: Confidential S-1 filing indicates intent to go public, which will require increased financial transparency and governance maturity.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & values**: OpenAI’s stated values include “Humanity first,” “Act with humility,” “Feel the AGI,” and “Ship joy.” Operating principles emphasize agency, creativity, rapid iteration, and intense focus.
- **Benefits**: Competitive health insurance, mental healthcare support, 24-week paid birth-parent leave (plus 20 weeks for other parents), generous PTO, annual learning & development stipend, daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), and a domestic conference budget.
- **Work environment**: Hybrid/office-based (San Francisco headquarters). The company offers a residency program for researchers and engineers transitioning into AI.
- **Impact**: Employees work directly on frontier AI models that shape the industry and society. The mission-driven nature attracts talent passionate about AGI’s societal implications.

## Sources
1. [OpenAI About Page](https://openai.com/about/)
2. [OpenAI Careers Page](https://openai.com/careers/)
3. [OpenAI Job Search](https://openai.com/careers/search)
4. [OpenAI Homepage](https://openai.com/)

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