Applied Engineering: Head of Data Engineering

About the Team

The Applied team brings OpenAI’s most capable technology to the world through our products such as ChatGPT and DALL-E. We empower consumers and developers alike to use and access our start-of-the-art AI models, allowing them to do things that they’ve never been able to before.

Across all product lines, we ensure that these powerful tools are used responsibly. This is a key part of OpenAI’s path towards safely deploying broadly beneficial Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth.

About the Role

We're seeking an experienced data engineering leader to build a world-class data engineering team and guide the development of our data architecture. This team is responsible for the foundational data assets that empower the rest of the company to leverage data effectively and ultimately drive product and business success. The team is responsible for developing key pipelines and core tables that 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:

• Build and manage a diverse, high-performing data engineering team.
• Develop and execute a vision for the foundational data pipelines and canonical data assets.
• Guide the direction of data architecture and engineering decisions, bringing your strong experience and knowledge to bear.
• Work collaboratively with various teams, including, Infrastructure, Data Science, Product, Marketing, Finance, and Research to understand their data needs and provide solutions that lead to direct product and business impact.
• Implement robust and fault-tolerant systems for data ingestion and processing.
• Ensure the security, integrity, and compliance of data according to industry and company standards.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 10+ years of experience in data engineering and managing high-performing data engineering teams 
• Have built a data stack from the ground up in a startup environment with deep expertise in the relevant tools and technologies.
• Are comfortable taking a leadership role in highly ambiguous, rapidly changing environments.
• Experience in at least one programming language commonly used within Data Engineering, such as Python, Scala, or Java. 
• Partner effectively across technical and non-technical teams to guide use of data to drive product and business impact.

This role is exclusively based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.