The Team: 

Upstart’s Lifecycle Platform team develops innovative solutions, strategies, and systems that enable personalized, timely communication with millions of current and prospective customers. We build and scale the platforms behind preference management, email, SMS, push notifications, and emerging channels—ensuring the right message reaches the right user at the right time.

As a Software Engineer II on the team, you will be part of the broader Growth organization and partner closely with Lifecycle Marketing, Distribution, Insights, Data Platform, Analytics, and ML teams. We are the technical thought leaders and subject matter experts for outbound communications across the company. Our mission is to design and operate the infrastructure that transforms rich customer data into actionable, high-impact engagement.

This team operates with speed and ownership. We deploy frequently, unblock ourselves, and hold a high bar for accountability. We are not a siloed engineering team—we collaborate deeply with cross-functional stakeholders and play a central role in shaping the future of Upstart’s marketing platforms.

How you’ll make an impact

• Design and build scalable backend services that power our unified communications platform across SMS, email, push, and future channels.
• Develop systems for real-time, event-triggered messaging and self-serve marketing automation and experimentation capabilities.
• Translate large, complex datasets into high-leverage marketing capabilities through APIs, streaming pipelines, and reverse ETL workflows.
• Partner closely with product managers, lifecycle marketing, data insights, analytics, and data platform teams to define requirements and deliver impactful, data-driven solutions.
• Lead medium-sized projects independently—proactively identifying risks, managing ambiguity, and driving execution from design through launch.
• Strengthen our engineering culture by improving system reliability, accelerating iteration, and clearly communicating technical trade-offs to cross-functional stakeholders.

Minimum Qualifications 

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or Mathematics, or a related field (or its equivalent) + 3 years of experience
• Experience building and operating microservices and APIs in a cloud environment (preferably AWS).
• Proficiency in at least one backend language such as Kotlin, Java, Ruby, or Python.
• Demonstrated ability to independently execute on projects, navigate ambiguity, and collaborate effectively with cross-functional partners.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to work in a distributed team

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting Marketing, Growth, or GTM teams, particularly in environments involving CDPs, customer segmentation, or campaign orchestration.
• Experience with reverse ETL tools (e.g., Hightouch, Census), data pipeline tooling (e.g., Airbyte, Fivetran, Databricks), or marketing automation platforms (e.g.,Iterable, Braze, or Salesforce Marketing Cloud).
• Familiarity with real-time event streaming systems and high-throughput messaging architectures.
• Experience integrating with third-party APIs and building systems that ingest, transform, and expose large volumes of data.
• Track record of leading medium-to-large projects and contributing to system design decisions with long-term platform impact.

Position location This role is available in the following locations: Remote

Time zone requirements The team operates on the East/West coast time zones.

Travel requirements As a digital first company, the majority of your work can be accomplished remotely. The majority of our employees can live and work anywhere in the U.S but are encouraged to to still spend high quality time in-person collaborating via regular onsites. The in-person sessions’ cadence varies depending on the team and role; most teams meet once or twice per quarter for 2-4 consecutive days at a time.

About the Team

At OpenAI, we’re building the connective tissue between our mission and our people. People Innovation Labs is a fast-moving engineering team embedded in the People organization, focused on rethinking how we find and retain the best talent and empower everyone to do their best work. From recruiting to culture, we’re designing systems that give our People Team a significant edge by infusing OpenAI’s models and first-principles thinking into every aspect of our work. Our projects range from greenfield 0-1 products like OpenHouse (our internal knowledge hub) to AI-powered automations and scalable recruiting tools. We’re defining the future of work at OpenAI, creating a blueprint for how AI can supercharge productivity, culture, and innovation.

About the Role

We’re seeking a Data Engineer to build data-intensive systems that will power People Innovation Labs’ internal products and enable the People Analytics function to do their best work. These data pipelines are crucial for our build-out of people products backed by business systems of record and for ongoing people data analytics.

One example of an employee-facing product you’ll help us build is OpenHouse, which serves as a culture and communication hub and an organization-wide front door into all other aspects of People Innovation Labs’ work. OpenHouse and other products in our portfolio are built by full stack product engineers who are deeply curious about culture, recruiting and people development, and want to know everything from the business strategy and metrics down through the code that gets us there. In this role, you will work with People Innovation Labs leadership and software engineers and the People Analytics team to build the data systems that enable this work.

In this role, you will:

• Design, build and manage people data pipelines, ensuring all data is seamlessly integrated into our Databricks warehouse.

• Develop canonical datasets to track key people metrics and People Innovation Labs product metrics.

• Work collaboratively with various teams, including, Data Platform, Data Science, People Analytics, and Compensation and Equity 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 as the primary data engineering expert on the team.

• Ensure the security, integrity, and compliance of data according to industry and company standards.

Your background might look something like:

• 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 data warehousing technologies such as Databricks and Snowflake, and expertise with ETL schedulers such as Fivetran, Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, or similar.

• Experience with distributed processing technologies and frameworks, such as Spark, Hadoop, Flink and distributed storage systems (e.g., HDFS, S3).

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 .

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.

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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.