Software Engineer, Research - Human Data

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

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 OpenAI’s Platform and Infrastructure Engineering organization advances the mission of deploying artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the benefit of all by delivering secure, scalable, and resilient technology solutions. Our team builds and maintains robust infrastructure that safeguards OpenAI’s data and systems while ensuring employees are well-equipped and seamlessly connected. By prioritizing security, reliability, and user-centric solutions, we empower OpenAI employees to drive impactful AI research, corporate operations, and product innovation. About the Role As a Software Engineer: Internal Applications, Enterprise, you will build internal products that make technology support and administration safer, faster, and less dependent on manual intervention. You will help reduce reliance on broadly privileged human actions, turn recurring technology problems into paved paths, and build agentic systems that can help resolve tickets end to end. A core part of the role is building the interfaces that bring employees, AI agents, and human responders together in a shared ITSM experience, with the right context, controls, and handoffs at each step. We are seeking engineers who enjoy working across frontend and backend layers on ambiguous, high-leverage enterprise problems. You should bring strong product judgment, solid backend engineering fundamentals, and an interest in building software that changes how technology support, system administration, and agent-assisted operations are delivered. The best fit will care as much about the quality of the operator and employee experience as the correctness of the backend systems behind it. In this role, you will: Build frontend experiences that let employees request help, let agents gather context and take safe actions, and let human responders review, approve, or take over without losing the thread. Reduce reliance on broadly privileged manual actions by replacing them with narrow, auditable, policy-aware aut

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 Enterprise Verticals builds role-specific ChatGPT Work experiences for high-value enterprise workflows. We combine product engineering, plugins and skills, connectors, data, evaluations, and customer evidence to turn useful demos into reliable daily work. This opening sits within the Technology vertical inside Enterprise Verticals. The group focuses on repeatable workflows for people at technology companies, beginning with functions such as data and analytics, sales, and design, and carries the shared platform needs—tool integration, permissions, quality measurement, and safe rollout—across those experiences. We work closely with Design, Research, GTM, Security, and platform teams, as well as with customers and design partners. Success means that people can reach a trustworthy first result, understand what the system did, and keep using the workflow—not merely that a prototype exists. About the Role We are looking for a full-stack product engineer who can own ambiguous enterprise workflows end to end: understand a customer problem, shape the product, build across frontend and backend, work through platform dependencies, instrument quality, and learn quickly with design partners. You will build across ChatGPT Work surfaces, services, plugins, connectors, and data or permission boundaries when the experience requires it. You will make quality and rollout observable through evaluations, product and operational signals, and clear fallback or rollback paths. This is a product-engineering role for someone who can move between user problems and system details without losing ownership of either. The strongest candidates will be able to turn specific customer evidence into a generalizable product, explain scope and architecture tradeoffs, and carry a feature from an early prototype through a bounded production rollout. In this role, you will: Build and ship role-specific workflows across ChatGPT Work surfaces, services, plugins, and connectors. Turn customer a

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