Software Engineer 3, Search Systems Replication & Routing

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 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 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 This team builds and operates the systems that enable OpenAI researchers to run reliable, scalable, and efficient research workflows. The team sits close to research and works across infrastructure, systems, and automation to make sure researchers have the tools and environments they need to move quickly. The work spans software engineering, infrastructure, systems administration, cluster operations, and reliability engineering. As OpenAI’s infrastructure evolves from bespoke bare-metal systems toward more standard, scalable platforms, the team needs engineers who can understand how systems work end-to-end and build the right abstractions without reinventing the wheel. About the Role As a Software Engineer on this team, you will build and operate the infrastructure that supports frontier research and critical research-facing systems. You will work on systems that sit close to the metal, but the role is not limited to classic operations or sysadmin work. We are looking for someone who can reason about networking, bootstrapping, Kubernetes, scalability, automation, and reliability - while also writing software to make these systems better over time. This role is a strong fit for an independent, high-ownership engineer who enjoys reliability-heavy infrastructure work but still wants to build. You do not need to come in as a kernel expert or highly algorithmic optimization engineer, but you should be deeply curious about infrastructure, comfortable debugging complex systems, and excited to support researchers doing novel work. We expect you to: Build and operate reliable infrastructure for research workloads and research-facing services. Support and improve systems across data infrastructure, processing, crawl and ingest, caching, search, observability, and clusterwide services. Improve cluster bootstrapping, provisioning, automation, and deployment workflows. Debug issues across networking, compute, storage, orchestration, and service reliability layers.

About the Team API Agents builds the shared agent harness, tools, and infrastructure that turn OpenAI’s frontier models into systems that can reliably complete real work. We carry the capabilities behind Codex into a much broader set of products and workflows across software engineering, research, finance, healthcare, enterprise operations, and more. Our work spans search and connected context, computer use, memory, delegation and multi-agent coordination, and safe execution. Sitting at the intersection of Research, Codex, infrastructure, and applied product teams, we build reusable agent capabilities that compound across the ecosystem. About the Role We are looking for an experienced backend software engineer to build the core systems behind the next generation of agents. You will design reliable services and abstractions that help agents find the right context, use tools and computers, retain knowledge, coordinate over long-running workflows, and take action safely. The role combines deep backend and infrastructure work with strong product judgment, with opportunities to work across agent runtimes, orchestration, search, execution environments, identity and permissions, observability, and evaluations. This is software and systems engineering rather than model training: success comes from strong backend fundamentals, high agency, and the ability to turn fast-moving research capabilities into dependable production primitives. In this role, you will: Design, build, and operate the shared agent harness and backend infrastructure that power long-running, high-value workflows across OpenAI and third-party products. Build reusable capabilities across search and connected context, computer use, memory, tool execution, delegation, subagents, and multi-agent orchestration. Establish the foundations agents need to operate safely in production, including secure execution environments, identity and permissions, observability, evaluations, reliability, and cost and latency effi

Overview: The Data Acquisition team within the Foundations organization at OpenAI is responsible for all aspects of data collection to support our model training operations. Our team manages web crawling and GPTBot services and works closely with Data Processing, Architecture, and Scaling teams. We are looking for a skilled Software Engineer to join our Data Acquisition team. Responsibilities: Own and lead engineering projects in the area of data acquisition including web crawling, data ingestion, and search. Collaborate with other sub-teams, such as Data Processing, Architecture, and Scaling, to ensure smooth data flow and system operability. Work closely with the legal team to handle any compliance or data privacy-related matters. Develop and deploy highly scalable distributed systems capable of handling petabytes of data. Architect and implement algorithms for data indexing and search capabilities. Build and maintain backend services for data storage, including work with key-value databases and synchronization. Deploy solutions in a Kubernetes Infrastructure-as-Code environment and perform routine system checks. Conduct and analyze experiments on data to provide insights into system performance. Qualifications: BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or a related field. 4+ years of industry experience in software development. Experience with large web crawlers a plus Strong expertise in large stateful distributed systems and data processing. Proficiency in Kubernetes, and Infrastructure-as-Code concepts. Willingness and enthusiasm for trying new approaches and technologies. Ability to handle multiple tasks and adapt to changing priorities. Strong communication skills, both written and verbal. 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