Strategic Overview
Data Engineer at OpenAI is a data opportunity centered on the specialist responsibilities and outcomes described in the employer's listing.
The published role emphasizes work such as Design, build and manage our data pipelines, ensuring all user event data is seamlessly integrated into our data warehouse. Develop canonical datasets to track key product metrics including user growth, engagement, and revenue.
The role is listed for San Francisco with hybrid working arrangement, giving candidates the practical context needed to assess fit before applying. Relevant signals in the listing include Applied AI, Applied AI Engineering.
Key information at a glance
About This Role
The Applied team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to consumers and businesses.
We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth.
About the role:
Key Responsibilities & Objectives
- Design, build and manage our data pipelines, ensuring all user event data is seamlessly integrated into our data warehouse.
- Develop canonical datasets to track key product metrics including user growth, engagement, and revenue.
- Implement robust and fault-tolerant systems for data ingestion and processing.
Required Qualifications & Candidate Blueprint
- Have 3+ years of experience as a data engineer and 8+ years of any software engineering experience(including data engineering).
- Experience with distributed processing technologies and frameworks, such as Hadoop, Flink and distributed storage systems (e.g., HDFS, S3).
- Solid understanding of Spark and ability to write, debug and optimize Spark code.
Salary & Benefits
Published compensation: $235K – $385K
Salary Benchmark
This role’s published compensation is compared with current employer-disclosed salary ranges for the same role in the same currency.
Benchmark uses active employer job postings in our database and excludes this listing. It is not a third-party salary estimate, and currencies are not converted.
Full Job Description
The following is the complete job description supplied by the source. We sanitize unsafe markup and remove external links, but do not shorten or rewrite the employer's source content.
About the team
The Applied team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to consumers and businesses.
We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth.
About the role:
We're seeking a Data Engineer to take the lead in building our data pipelines and core tables for OpenAI. These pipelines are crucial for powering analyses, safety systems that guide business decisions, product growth, and prevent bad actors. If you're passionate about working with data and are eager to create solutions with significant impact, we'd love to hear from you. This role also provides the opportunity to collaborate closely with the researchers behind ChatGPT and help them train new models to deliver to users. As we continue our rapid growth, we value data-driven insights, and your contributions will play a pivotal role in our trajectory. Join us in shaping the future of OpenAI!
In this role, you will:
Design, build and manage our data pipelines, ensuring all user event data is seamlessly integrated into our data warehouse.
Develop canonical datasets to track key product metrics including user growth, engagement, and revenue.
Work collaboratively with various teams, including, Infrastructure, Data Science, Product, Marketing, Finance, and Research to understand their data needs and provide solutions.
Implement robust and fault-tolerant systems for data ingestion and processing.
Participate in data architecture and engineering decisions, bringing your strong experience and knowledge to bear.
Ensure the security, integrity, and compliance of data according to industry and company standards.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have 3+ years of experience as a data engineer and 8+ years of any software engineering experience(including data engineering).
Proficiency in at least one programming language commonly used within Data Engineering, such as Python, Scala, or Java.
Experience with distributed processing technologies and frameworks, such as Hadoop, Flink and distributed storage systems (e.g., HDFS, S3).
Expertise with any of ETL schedulers such as Airflow, Dagster, Prefect or similar frameworks.
Solid understanding of Spark and ability to write, debug and optimize Spark code.
This role is exclusively based in our San Francisco HQ. Some of our roles are also located in our Mountain View or New York offices. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.
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 extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.
We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy
At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
Editor’s Market Perspective (Our Custom Analysis)
Why This Position Matters
This data opening is a useful opportunity for candidates whose experience matches Applied AI, Applied AI Engineering. Its strongest career signal is the scope of the work itself — particularly Design, build and manage our data pipelines, ensuring all user event data is seamlessly integrated into our data warehouse. — rather than a generic title alone.
Resume & Application Strategy
For the application, mirror the employer's language where it truthfully matches your background: foreground Applied AI, Applied AI Engineering, quantify outcomes from comparable work, and place the most relevant experience near the top of the resume. If the listing specifies tools, platforms, leadership scope, or domain experience, use those exact terms in context instead of presenting an unrelated keyword list.
We organize source-provided information into this independent job-seeker overview. Compensation is shown only when the source provides it; the official listing remains the authority for current requirements and application instructions.