CrawlJobs Logo
OpenAI Logo OpenAI · IT - Software Development

Software Engineer, Distributed Data Systems

United States, San Francisco 230000.00 - 385000.00 USD / Year · Job Posted February 21, 2026
Apply Position
Job Link Share

Job Description

The Sora team is pioneering multimodal capabilities for OpenAI’s foundation models. We’re a hybrid research and product team focused on integrating multimodal functionalities into our AI products, ensuring they are reliable, user-friendly, and aligned with our mission of broad societal benefit. As a Software Engineer, Distributed Data Systems, you will design and scale the infrastructure that powers large-scale multimodal training and evaluation at OpenAI. You’ll manage distributed data pipelines, collaborate closely with researchers to translate requirements into robust systems, and harden pipelines that serve as the backbone for Sora’s rapid iteration cycles.

Job Responsibility

  • Design, build, and maintain data infrastructure systems such as distributed compute, data orchestration, distributed storage, streaming infrastructure, machine learning infrastructure while ensuring scalability, reliability, and security
  • Ensure our data platform can scale by orders of magnitude while remaining reliable and efficient
  • Partner with researchers to deeply understand requirements and translate them into production-ready systems
  • Harden, optimize, and maintain critical data infrastructure systems that power multimodal training and evaluation

Requirements

  • Strong experience with distributed systems and large-scale infrastructure
  • Detail-oriented with rigor in building and maintaining reliable systems
  • Excellent software engineering fundamentals and organizational skills
  • Comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change
  • Strong interest in data

What we offer

  • Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
  • Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
  • 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
  • Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
  • Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
  • 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
  • Mental health and wellness support
  • Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
  • Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
  • Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
  • Relocation support for eligible employees
  • Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends
  • Offers Equity
  • Performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees
OpenAI - All Job Offers

Looking for more opportunities?

Search for other job offers that match your skills and interests.

Suggested Tags: Frontend Developer Secretary Talent Manager Salesforce Administrator Data Analyst
Similar Jobs for

Software Engineer, Distributed Data Systems

8 matching positions

Software engineer 2 / Senior Software engineer - Azure Data

Microsoft's Azure Data engineering team is leading the transformation of analyti...
Location
Location
India , Bangalore
Salary
Salary:
Not provided
https://www.microsoft.com/ Logo
Microsoft Corporation
Expiration Date
Until further notice
Flip Icon
Requirements
Requirements
  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 3+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience
  • Experience with the Azure stack including Storage, Compute, Networking, Fabric, Purview, Synapse, AKS, DevOps, Data Factory, or Power BI
  • Experience with big data technologies such as Spark, Kafka, Hadoop, or HBase
  • Experience building data lake or data engineering products, tools, or pipelines
  • Familiarity with container-based architectures (Docker, Kubernetes)
  • Ability to debug complex distributed systems on Linux and/or Windows platforms
Job Responsibility
Job Responsibility
  • Write extensible, maintainable code in C#, Java, Scala, or Python for Fabric Materialized Lake View services and HDInsight components
  • Use AI tools and coding best practices across the development lifecycle
  • Design data refresh, scheduling, and query optimisation features with minimal supervision
  • Review code from teammates for correctness, test coverage, security risks, and adherence to team standards
  • Coach junior engineers through code reviews
  • Debug complex issues in distributed systems running on Azure, Linux, and Windows
  • Run live site operations on a rotational, on-call basis
  • Integrate logging and instrumentation to gather telemetry on system health, performance, reliability, and security
  • Work with product managers, technical leads, and partners across geographies to define customer requirements for Materialized Lake View features
  • Fulltime
Read More
Arrow Right

Software Engineer, Distributed Systems - Infra

You'll build and scale the application and data infrastructure that supports 70M...
Location
Location
United States , San Francisco
Salary
Salary:
180000.00 - 275000.00 USD / Year
gamma.app Logo
Gamma
Expiration Date
Until further notice
Flip Icon
Requirements
Requirements
  • 3–5+ years of backend engineering experience building scalable systems
  • Strong proficiency in backend technologies (Node.js, Python, or similar) and databases (PostgreSQL, Redis)
  • Experience with high-traffic production systems and performance optimization
  • Track record shipping high-quality, complex applications under tight timelines
  • Product-minded approach with understanding of how technical decisions impact user experience and business metrics
  • Thrives in fast-paced, product-led environments where shipping quality directly impacts growth
  • Experience with real-time collaboration systems, event pipelines, or AI-powered applications (Nice to have)
Job Responsibility
Job Responsibility
  • Design and implement scalable APIs, distributed systems, and data infrastructure that serve millions of users
  • Help define and evolve the core data model and storage systems powering Gamma's business
  • Ship backend systems that directly impact growth metrics and user experience
  • Work on real-time collaborative editing, databases, public APIs, and high-volume event pipelines
  • Balance long-term technical investments with rapid shipping velocity
  • Collaborate across frontend, product, and data teams to deliver high-quality solutions under tight timelines
What we offer
What we offer
  • Equity
  • Fulltime
Read More
Arrow Right

Senior Software Engineer - Distributed Systems

Microsoft’s Azure Data engineering team is leading the transformation of analyti...
Location
Location
Canada , Vancouver
Salary
Salary:
114400.00 - 203900.00 CAD / Year
https://www.microsoft.com/ Logo
Microsoft Corporation
Expiration Date
Until further notice
Flip Icon
Requirements
Requirements
  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience
  • 3+ years experience with distributed messaging systems such as Azure Service Bus, Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, Google Pub/Sub, or SQS/Kinesis or experience with stream processing or real-time data platforms such as Apache Spark, Flink, Storm, or similar frameworks
  • Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role
  • This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
Job Responsibility
Job Responsibility
  • Drive the design and implementation of complex, large-scale distributed systems by producing technical designs, proof-of-concepts, and prototype solutions from ambiguous or high-level requirements
  • Own end-to-end delivery of key system components, including design tradeoffs, implementation, testing strategy, deployment, and long-term operability
  • Continuously improve system performance, scalability, and resilience by identifying architectural gaps, leading refactoring efforts, and addressing systemic technical debt
  • Define and apply metrics, best practices, and quality bars to ensure long-term service stability, operational excellence, and strong return on engineering investment
  • Lead code reviews and design discussions, setting technical direction and mentoring engineers to improve overall code quality and system design maturity
  • Collaborate across teams and organizations to align designs, influence dependencies, and deliver solutions that scale across Azure
  • Build and evolve the core messaging infrastructure that underpins hundreds of thousands of Azure applications, supporting critical platform capabilities such as eventing, asynchronous workflows, telemetry, and diagnostics.
  • Fulltime
Read More
Arrow Right

Machine Learning Engineer, Distributed Data Systems

As a Research Engineer, Distributed Data Systems, you will design and scale the ...
Location
Location
United States , San Francisco
Salary
Salary:
295000.00 - 445000.00 USD / Year
openai.com Logo
OpenAI
Expiration Date
Until further notice
Flip Icon
Requirements
Requirements
  • Strong experience with distributed systems and large-scale infrastructure
  • Detail-oriented and bring rigor to building and maintaining reliable systems
  • Excellent software engineering fundamentals and organizational skills
  • Comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change
Job Responsibility
Job Responsibility
  • Design, build, and maintain data infrastructure systems such as distributed compute, data orchestration, distributed storage, streaming infrastructure, machine learning infrastructure while ensuring scalability, reliability, and security
  • Ensure our data platform can scale by orders of magnitude while remaining reliable and efficient
  • Partner with researchers to deeply understand requirements and translate them into production-ready systems
  • Harden, optimize, and maintain critical data infrastructure systems that power multimodal training and evaluation
What we offer
What we offer
  • Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
  • Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
  • 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
  • Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
  • Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
  • 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
  • Mental health and wellness support
  • Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
  • Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
  • Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
  • Fulltime
Read More
Arrow Right

Principal Software Engineer - Distributed Systems

Microsoft’s Azure Data engineering team is leading the transformation of analyti...
Location
Location
Canada , Vancouver
Salary
Salary:
142400.00 - 257500.00 CAD / Year
https://www.microsoft.com/ Logo
Microsoft Corporation
Expiration Date
Until further notice
Flip Icon
Requirements
Requirements
  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience
  • 5+ years professional experience in enterprise level distributed systems
  • Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role
  • These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
Job Responsibility
Job Responsibility
  • Leads by example within the team by producing extensible and maintainable
  • Optimizes, debugs, refactors, and reuses code to improve performance and maintainability, effectiveness, and return on investment (ROI)
  • Applies metrics to drive the quality and stability of code, as well as appropriate coding patterns and best practices
  • Applies debugging tools and examines logs, telemetry, and other methods to verify assumptions through writing and developing code proactively before issues occur and reactively as issues occur for products
  • Conducts retrospective debugging of solutions to identify root causes of problems
  • Reviews the code of a product to assure it meets the team's and Microsoft’s quality standards, is reliable and accurate, and is appropriate for the scale of the product/solution area
  • Applies feedback to current and future iterations
  • Participates in code reviews to ensure coding standards are followed
  • Considers diagnosability, reliability, and maintainability when reviewing code, and understands when code is ready to be shared or delivered
  • Applies and screens for coding patterns and best practices in reviews, and provides feedback on code to drive adherence to best practices
  • Fulltime
Read More
Arrow Right

Senior Software Engineer - Distributed Systems

Microsoft’s Azure Data engineering team is leading the transformation of analyti...
Location
Location
Canada , Vancouver
Salary
Salary:
114400.00 - 203900.00 CAD / Year
https://www.microsoft.com/ Logo
Microsoft Corporation
Expiration Date
Until further notice
Flip Icon
Requirements
Requirements
  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience
  • 2+ years professional experience building large scale enterprise level distributed systems
  • Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role
  • These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter
Job Responsibility
Job Responsibility
  • Leads by example within the team by producing extensible and maintainable. Optimizes, debugs, refactors, and reuses code to improve performance and maintainability, effectiveness, and return on investment (ROI). Applies metrics to drive the quality and stability of code, as well as appropriate coding patterns and best practices
  • Applies debugging tools and examines logs, telemetry, and other methods to verify assumptions through writing and developing code proactively before issues occur and reactively as issues occur for products. Conducts retrospective debugging of solutions to identify root causes of problems
  • Reviews the code of a product to assure it meets the team's and Microsoft’s quality standards, is reliable and accurate, and is appropriate for the scale of the product/solution area. Applies feedback to current and future iterations. Participates in code reviews to ensure coding standards are followed. Considers diagnosability, reliability, and maintainability when reviewing code, and understands when code is ready to be shared or delivered. Applies and screens for coding patterns and best practices in reviews, and provides feedback on code to drive adherence to best practices
  • Leads discussions for the architecture of products/solutions and creates proposals for architecture by testing design hypotheses and helping to refine code plans. Provides reactions, proposed solutions, and inputs to architects. Partially owns solutions for architecting of solutions, with minimal technical oversight. Develops design documents for designs or User Stories, and determines the technology that will be leveraged and how it will interact. Shares learnings and identified solutions from investigations with the team and owns for some design decisions. Assures system architecture meets security and compliance requirements and expectations
  • Independently creates a clear and articulated plan for testing and assuring quality of solutions, and defines success for outcomes of tests (e.g., unit tests). Identifies needs for a broad versus selected approach in testing mechanisms and makes informed decisions to implement the most effective tests. Drives efforts to add new tests, remove antiquated tests, and aggregate tests to improve the test suite. Improves recommendations to the team and augments test cases to ensure that solutions have good test coverage. Drives efforts to continually integrate automation features when planning for testing
  • Drives identification of dependencies and the development of design documents for a product, application, service or platform. Identifies other teams and technologies that will be leveraged, how they will interact, and when one's own system may provide support to others. Determines back-end dependencies associated with product, application, service, or platform functionality for the solution/product area. Understands up and downstream effects of solutions and work provided to ensure appropriate security and performance, drives reliability in the solutions, and optimizes dependency chains and retrieves across teams
  • Collaborates with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project manager, technical lead) to align on user requirements for a scenario. Leverages a variety of feedback channels to incorporate insights into future designs or solution fixes. Ensures appropriate continuous feedback loops measuring customer value, usage patterns, and other actionable metrics of value are incorporated
  • Embody our culture and values
  • Fulltime
Read More
Arrow Right

Senior Staff Software Engineer - Distributed Systems

Fivetran is building data pipelines to power the modern data stack for thousands...
Location
Location
Germany
Salary
Salary:
Not provided
fivetran.com Logo
Fivetran
Expiration Date
Until further notice
Flip Icon
Requirements
Requirements
  • 5+ years of hands-on or research experience maintaining and operating high-performance containerized applications that span multiple services
  • Deep understanding of cloud infrastructure, deployment, service orchestration, software optimizations and performance engineering of highly distributed services
  • Proven track record of leading and delivering large and complicated projects
  • Strong development skills in Java
  • Experience running and debugging Kubernetes containerized services
  • Solid experience with public clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP)
  • Growth mindset and excitement about breaking the status quo by seeking innovative solutions
  • Excellent team player who is consistent in making everyone around you better
Job Responsibility
Job Responsibility
  • Partner closely with product teams to understand requirements and design cutting-edge new capabilities that go directly into customer’s hands
  • Design, develop, implement, and operate highly reliable large-scale data lake systems in cooperation with a dedicated data lake engineering team and our SRE teams
  • Drive significant performance, latency, and availability improvements for our data lake services
  • Ensure operational excellence of the services and meet the commitments to our customers regarding security, reliability, availability, and performance
  • Investigate and resolve fault-tolerance and high availability issues as well as performance and scale challenges both inside and across service boundaries
  • Contribute to open-source projects such as DuckDB and Apache Polaris
  • Embrace Fivetran innovations with open-source standards and toolsets
  • Set technical directions and influence cross-functional teams
What we offer
What we offer
  • 100% employer-paid medical insurance*
  • Generous paid time-off policy (PTO), plus paid sick time, inclusive parental leave policy, holidays, and volunteer days off
  • RSU stock grants*
  • Professional development and training opportunities
  • Company virtual happy hours, free food, and fun team-building activities
  • Monthly cell phone stipend
  • Access to an innovative mental health support platform that offers personalized care and resources in areas such as: therapy, coaching, and self-guided mindfulness exercises for all covered employees and their covered dependents
  • Fulltime
Read More
Arrow Right

Staff Software Engineer, Search & Distributed Systems

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer who would thrive on being accountab...
Location
Location
USA , Buffalo
Salary
Salary:
165000.00 - 260000.00 USD / Year
acvauctions.com Logo
ACV Auctions
Expiration Date
Until further notice
Flip Icon
Requirements
Requirements
  • 8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3+ years operating at a Senior or Staff level focusing on distributed systems and high-throughput platforms.
  • Deep, authoritative knowledge of Elasticsearch internals. You have managed large-scale clusters and deeply understand mapping, analysis, query optimization, cluster state management, and split-brain mitigation.
  • Proficiency in the systems upstream and downstream of Search. You have hands-on experience with Kubernetes (EKS/GKE), API Gateway/BFF architectures, and event streams (Kafka).
  • A proven track record of implementing fault-tolerant patterns (retries, rate limiting, circuit breaking, dead letter queues) in microservice architectures.
  • Expert-level ability to instrument systems and diagnose complex performance issues using modern observability stacks (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
  • Strong communication skills with a proven ability to influence cross-functional teams, build consensus around architectural decisions (the Knoster model!), and mentor mid-level and senior engineers.
Job Responsibility
Job Responsibility
  • Architect for Scale: Design, configure, and scale our Elasticsearch clusters. You will define our global strategies for shard routing, Index Lifecycle Management (ILM), heap tuning, and data tiering to support massive auction throughput.
  • Master the Failure Modes: Anticipate and engineer away points of failure. You will design circuit breakers, implement backpressure mechanisms, and tune asymmetric timeouts to prevent retry storms between our BFFs, K8s services, and the Search layer.
  • Expert Troubleshooting & IR: Act as the ultimate technical escalation point for complex, cross-system performance degradation. You will dive deep into JVM metrics, Garbage Collection pauses, K8s network bottlenecks, and slow logs to uncover and remediate root causes.
  • Holistic System Ownership: Manage the entire data lifecycle. You will optimize the ingestion pipelines syncing our event datastreams driven by producers and consumers (Kafka) to Elasticsearch, ensuring eventual consistency and data integrity at scale.
  • Drive Engineering Excellence: Draft authoritative architectural Blueprints, SOPs, and Runbooks. You will elevate the surrounding engineering culture by coaching teams on distributed systems design, observability best practices, and incident management.
  • Modernize & Innovate: Scan the horizon for emerging technologies. You will help evaluate and integrate next-generation search capabilities (e.g., Vector Search, RAG architectures) to support our broader AI and machine learning initiatives.
What we offer
What we offer
  • Multiple medical plans including a high deductible, low cost health plan
  • Company-sponsored (paid) Short-Term Disability, Long-Term Disability, and Life Insurance
  • Comprehensive optional benefits such as Dental, Vision, Supplemental Life/AD&D, Legal/ID Protection, and Accident and Critical Illness Insurance
  • Generous paid time off options, including uncapped vacation days, the greater of 3 paid sick days or in accordance with the applicable state or local paid sick leave law, 6 paid company holidays, 2 floating holidays, parental leave, bereavement leave, jury duty leave, voting leave, and other forms of paid leave as required by applicable law or regulation
  • Employee Stock Purchase Program with additional opportunities to earn stock in the Company
  • Retirement planning through the Company's 401(k)
  • Fulltime
Read More
Arrow Right