Software Engineer, Habitat (Online Data)

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 instru