Software Engineer, Database Systems

About the Team We’re hiring Software Engineers to join our broader Infrastructure organization, which supports multiple high-impact teams. Depending on your interests and experience, you could work on one of several focus areas—including Core Distributed Systems, Reliability Engineering, Observability, Developer Productivity or Cloud Infrastructure. About the Role All teams are deeply collaborative, work on mission-critical services, and are responsible for building distributed, scalable infrastructure to bring OpenAI’s technology to the world through products like ChatGPT and the OpenAI API. You’ll work closely with stakeholders to understand infrastructure, data and compute needs, setting the technical strategy that supports cutting-edge research and product development. This is a critical role for someone who is passionate about solving complex engineering problems at scale, ensuring their performance, scalability and reliability Team Focus Areas Distributed Systems: Owning and building important, highly scalable, available, performant, and reliable distributed systems (and their building blocks) to power the entire stack at OpenAI Systems Engineering: Work across layers of the stack—debugging system bottlenecks, evolving core infrastructure, and solving novel problems in performance and scalability. Reliability Engineering: Build scalable, fault-tolerant systems and lead efforts around service health, incident response, and resilience. Observability: Design and maintain observability tooling (metrics, logs, tracing) to give teams visibility into production systems at scale. Developer Productivity: Create tools, environments, and workflows that help engineers ship high-quality software faster and more safely. Cloud Infrastructure: Own the cloud-native infrastructure (compute, networking, storage) that underpins all services and research workloads. Databases: Building high performance, distributed database systems that power all of OpenAI's product stack. In this

Who We Are Notion is the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents think together . We're building one place where your knowledge, projects, meetings, and AI tools live side by side, so work is faster, clearer, and less fragmented. Millions of individuals, small teams, and large companies run their work on Notion. Notinos (our employees) are customer zero in bringing this future of work to life. We care about craft, building things that last, and the belief that great work is still fundamentally human. Our goal isn’t to ship the next feature. Each and every team of Notinos is working to set the standard for how humans work together in the AI era. From building a business’s system of record to making and managing AI agents to automating away the busy work, we care deeply about giving our customers more time for their life’s work. About the Role: This role will be based in San Francisco. We work from our offices on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays (our Anchor Days) because we do our best thinking and building together in person. We’re looking for someone who’s excited to work alongside the team during those days. You’ll build the systems that let any knowledge worker leverage fast, scalable databases without having to become a DBA. You’ll be a hands-on technical leader, helping set the architectural direction and roadmap as we take a new product from early alpha to general availability. You’ll work directly with early customers to shape foundational technical and product decisions. Then, together, we’ll work on scaling as adoption and workloads grow. This is a backend-leaning role with work spanning the stack. You might build the systems that provision and manage a fleet of customer Postgres instances, design how user-defined schemas evolve safely, or make complex queries execute efficiently. You’ll also follow those systems into the product: improving how a table loads, how users understand a slow operation, or how an agent safely works with their data. You’ll

Who We Are Notion is the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents think together . We're building one place where your knowledge, projects, meetings, and AI tools live side by side, so work is faster, clearer, and less fragmented. Millions of individuals, small teams, and large companies run their work on Notion. Notinos (our employees) are customer zero in bringing this future of work to life. We care about craft, building things that last, and the belief that great work is still fundamentally human. Our goal isn’t to ship the next feature. Each and every team of Notinos is working to set the standard for how humans work together in the AI era. From building a business’s system of record to making and managing AI agents to automating away the busy work, we care deeply about giving our customers more time for their life’s work. About the Role: As a Software Engineer on Collections Infra, you’ll help scale the infrastructure behind Notion’s database block. Databases power views, boards, charts, forms, and the workflows customers use to run their companies; as Notion grows into larger enterprise deployments and AI-native work, those systems need to become faster, more reliable, and ready for much higher concurrency. This team sits between infrastructure and product, building backend architecture that improves the customer experience while becoming a platform other Notion teams can build on. You’ll work on problems like database load performance, microservices, high-volume writes from agents, and the flexibility that makes Notion databases powerful and hard to scale. This role can be based in either San Francisco or New York City. We work from our offices on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays (our Anchor Days) because we do our best thinking and building together in person. We’re looking for someone who’s excited to work alongside the team during those days. What You'll Achieve: By your 90th day, you’ll understand how Collections Infra supports Notion’s database

Who We Are Notion is the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents think together . We're building one place where your knowledge, projects, meetings, and AI tools live side by side, so work is faster, clearer, and less fragmented. Millions of individuals, small teams, and large companies run their work on Notion. Notinos (our employees) are customer zero in bringing this future of work to life. We care about craft, building things that last, and the belief that great work is still fundamentally human. Our goal isn’t to ship the next feature. Each and every team of Notinos is working to set the standard for how humans work together in the AI era. From building a business’s system of record to making and managing AI agents to automating away the busy work, we care deeply about giving our customers more time for their life’s work. About the Role Collections Experience owns the product experience for Notion’s database block and everything on top of it: properties, views, forms, permissions, and many more features. If you’ve ever typed /database in a Notion page, you’ve already used something our team built. We’re hiring an experienced software engineer to accelerate our mission to build a flexible, reliable, and intuitive primitive that gives everyone the power to model their work exactly as they imagine— from simple lists to the most complex workflows. We’re 8+ engineers, designers, and PMs across SF and NYC. You’ll work across the stack in TypeScript, ship features that touch both the data model and the UI, and help shape where the database block goes next. What You'll Achieve Design and ship new database properties and views that expand what people can model in Notion Design permission models that hold up at the scale of our largest customers Partner with the Agent team to grow what Notion Agent can do with databases, from tool development to eval-driven iteration Collaborate closely with product and design on features that are ambiguous up front and require

About the Team At OpenAI, we’re building safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence. We deploy our models through ChatGPT, our APIs, and other cutting-edge products. Behind the scenes, making these systems fast, reliable, and cost-efficient requires world-class infrastructure. The Caching Infrastructure team is responsible for building a caching layer that powers many critical use cases at OpenAI. We aim to provide a high-availability, multi-tenant cache platform that scales automatically with workload, minimizes tail latency, and supports a diverse range of use cases. We’re looking for an experienced engineer to help design and scale this critical infrastructure. The ideal candidate has deep experience in distributed caching systems (e.g., Redis, Memcached), networking fundamentals, and Kubernetes-based service orchestration. In This Role, You Will: Design, build, and operate OpenAI’s multi-tenant caching platform used across inference, identity, quota, and product experiences. Define the long-term vision and roadmap for caching as a core infra capability, balancing performance, durability, and cost. Collaborate with other infra teams (e.g., networking, observability, databases) and product teams to ensure our caching platform meets their needs. You Might Thrive In This Role If You: Have 5+ years of experience building and scaling distributed systems, with a strong focus on caching, load balancing, or storage systems. Have deep expertise with Redis, Memcached, or similar solutions, including clustering, durability configurations, client-side connection patterns, and performance tuning. Have production experience with Kubernetes, service meshes (e.g., Envoy), and autoscaling systems. Think rigorously about latency, reliability, throughput, and cost in designing platform capabilities. Thrive in a fast-paced environment and enjoy balancing pragmatic engineering with long-term technical excellence. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company d

About the Team API Enterprise Controls is part of the API Infrastructure organization and owns the platform capabilities that help developers, startups, and enterprises adopt the OpenAI API securely and confidently. We build the systems underneath our APIs and developer platform across authentication and identity, service accounts and key management, secure networking, compliance, auditability, observability, and operational controls. Our users are developers and teams running critical applications on OpenAI, and we partner closely with Product, go-to-market, security, and infrastructure teams to turn their most important needs into reliable, intuitive platform capabilities. About the Role We are looking for an exceptional backend software engineer to help define and ship the enterprise capabilities our API Platform needs to scale.; this is a product-engineering role grounded in deep backend systems. You will work across databases, streaming systems, request routing, authentication, and developer-facing APIs while bringing strong product judgment, developer empathy, and attention to the small details that make a platform easier to understand, trust, and operate. You will lead large cross-functional initiatives, work closely with Product and go-to-market teams, engage directly with sophisticated users, and carry ambiguous needs from discovery through design, launch, and iteration. In this role, you will: Own backend product capabilities end to end across authentication and identity, service accounts and key controls, secure networking, compliance, observability, and operational workflows. Partner with Product, go-to-market, security, infrastructure teams, and sophisticated customers to identify needs, shape the roadmap, and lead large cross-functional projects from design through launch. Design developer-facing APIs, system behavior, configuration, error handling, safe defaults, auditing, and notifications with exceptional care for the details that define a great dev