Research Engineer, Retrieval & Search, Applied Engineering

About the Team: The Database Systems team specializes in high-performance distributed databases. Our team built Rockset, the real-time search, analytics, and vector database that powers all vector search and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) at OpenAI. In addition to retrieval, as an online database, Rockset powers core functionality across all of OpenAI's product lines and many critical internal use cases. About the Role : We are looking for engineers passionate about distributed systems, close-to-the-metal performance optimization (our core engine is written in C++), and building scalable database infrastructure from the ground up. As an engineer on the Database Systems team, you'll contribute to the core database engine, driving improvements across ingestion, query execution, indexing, and storage. You'll partner with teams across OpenAI to unlock new product capabilities and help scale online database reliability and throughput as usage grows by orders of magnitude. In this role you will: Design, build, and operate high-performance distributed systems Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks to scale infrastructure to the next order of magnitude Define long-term technical direction and guide system evolution Collaborate with product, engineering, and research teams to deliver scalable and reliable infrastructure Dig deep into complex production issues across the stack Contribute to incident response, postmortems, and best practices for system reliability You might thrive in this role if you: Have significant experience building, scaling, and optimizing distributed systems at scale Are curious about database internals, storage engines, or low-latency query systems Enjoy debugging challenging performance issues in complex, high-throughput systems Have experience operating production clusters at scale (e.g., Kubernetes or other orchestration systems) Think rigorously about scalability, correctness, and reliability Thrive in fast-paced environments with high

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 companies in 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: Build, lead, and grow high-performing infrastructure engineering teams. 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. Reduce operational toil and incident frequency through better abstractions, gua

About the Team The Intelligence & Investigations Engineering team builds systems that detect, analyze, and disrupt abuse across OpenAI’s products. We partner closely with the Child Safety team and cross-functional groups to protect users while advancing OpenAI’s goal of developing AI that benefits everyone. About the Role As a Fullstack Engineer focused on child safety, you’ll build data-intensive, AI-powered applications and infrastructure that enable operators and investigators to work effectively and responsibly. You’ll adapt quickly in ambiguous, fast-moving environments to deliver well-crafted, reliable tooling for high-severity safety work. *Candidates should understand this role involves exposure to sensitive and egregious content. In this role, you will: 4+ years of experience as a software engineer Prototype, build, and maintain intelligence systems that detect, triage, and enable efficient human review of possible high severity harm Work hand in hand with operators and investigators, designing and delivering systems that enable them to do their work faster, more accurately, and more safely. Develop across the stack: UIs, services, pipelines, and anything else required to solve the problems we face. Interact with partners across Product Policy, Platform Integrity, Safety Systems, and Research Contribute to the team’s technical strategy, especially for child safety related tools and systems Report on impact in a data-driven fashion You might thrive in this role if you: Have a strong software engineering foundation and enjoy owning systems end-to-end—from infrastructure and data ingestion to frontend tooling Are energized by working at the frontier of AI capabilities, integrating new models and APIs into practical systems Have experience building and operating large-scale data pipelines or search/retrieval systems Are proficient in Python and/or TypeScript, and familiar with tools like Spark, Kafka, Flink, data warehouses, and SQL Take a product-minded ap

About the Team The Foundations Research team works on high-risk, high-reward ideas that could shape the next decade of AI. Our goal is to advance the science and data that enable our training and scaling efforts, with a particular focus on future frontier models. Pushing the boundaries of data, scaling laws, optimization techniques, model architectures, and efficiency improvements to propel our science. The Search team sits within Foundations, building agentic search by co-designing model–system interfaces with the core search stack (serving, indexing, retrieval) to translate model intent into reliable, real-world actions. Operating at the frontier of AI and information retrieval, the team develops large-scale systems that transform and index vast corpora, enabling models to reason over global knowledge and act dependably. In close partnership with researchers, we rapidly bring modeling breakthroughs into production and redefine how intelligent systems discover, retrieve, and synthesize information at planetary scale. About the Role We’re looking for a Software Engineer focused on building and scaling retrieval systems. You’ll work with a team of researchers and engineers to develop infrastructure that enables models to retrieve and act on the right information at the right time. This includes designing and operating indexing systems, retrieval pipelines, and serving layers. This work supports retrieval across OpenAI products and research, with direct impact on system performance, reliability, and scale. Responsibilities Build and scale retrieval infrastructure across indexing, serving, and query execution. Develop low-latency, high-throughput systems for real-time model interaction. Partner with research to productionize embedding and retrieval techniques. Support dense, sparse, and hybrid retrieval pipelines. Own system performance, reliability, and observability at scale. Collaborate across Pretraining, Inference, and Product teams to integrate retrieval end-to-e

About the Team The Foundations Research team works on high-risk, high-reward ideas that could shape the next decade of AI. Our goal is to advance the science and data that enable our training and scaling efforts, with a particular focus on future frontier models. Pushing the boundaries of data, scaling laws, optimization techniques, model architectures, and efficiency improvements to propel our science. The Search team sits within Foundations, building agentic search by co-designing model–system interfaces with the core search stack (serving, indexing, retrieval) to translate model intent into reliable, real-world actions. Operating at the frontier of AI and information retrieval, the team develops large-scale systems that transform and index vast corpora, enabling models to reason over global knowledge and act dependably. In close partnership with researchers, we rapidly bring modeling breakthroughs into production and redefine how intelligent systems discover, retrieve, and synthesize information at planetary scale. About the Role We’re looking for a researcher focused on our embedding retrieval efforts. You’ll work with a a team of world-class research scientists and engineers developing foundational technology that enables models to retrieve and condition on the right information, at the right time. This includes designing new embedding training objectives, scalable vector store architectures, and dynamic indexing methods. This work will support retrieval across many OpenAI products and internal research efforts, with opportunities for scientific publication and deep technical impact. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. Responsibilities Tackle embedding models and retrieval systems optimized for grounding, relevance, and adaptive reasoning. Collaborate with a team of researchers and engineers building end-to-end infrastructure for training, evaluati

About the Team The Search research team focuses on building the systems that help AI systems find, retrieve, and use information from the world. We aim to make answers more useful and grounded for more than a billion ChatGPT users. About the Role We’re looking for a Technical Program Manager to lead a broad portfolio of research and engineering programs that power search. You’ll partner closely with researchers, engineers, and product leaders to turn ambitious goals into clear plans, resolve dependencies, and move complex technical work forward. This role combines technical depth, product judgment, and hands-on execution. You’ll work across retrieval, indexing, and model improvements, while collaborating with policy, legal, and external data partners. You’ll help teams make informed tradeoffs and build practical ways of working that support a fast-moving research environment. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. In this role, you will: Lead programs across model training, retrieval, large-scale indexing, and search infrastructure. Translate evolving goals into prioritized workstreams with clear owners, milestones, dependencies, and resource needs. Partner with research, engineering, and product leads to define requirements and make tradeoffs across scope, quality, performance, timelines, and cost. Establish program success metrics and use them to guide priorities and track improvements in coverage, answer quality, responsiveness, and trust. Identify technical and cross-functional risks early, drive blockers to resolution, and communicate progress and decisions clearly to teams and leadership. Coordinate with product, policy, legal, and external partners on data access, use, and presentation, helping teams resolve decisions that span technical and non-technical domains. Manage dependencies with data providers and build repeatable processes that help research and engineering teams execute effectively as the search effort grows. You might thrive in this role if you