Backend Software Engineer, Applied Foundations

Backend Software Engineer, Applied Foundations | OpenAI

Applied AI Engineering - San Francisco

About the Team

OpenAI’s Applications Engineering organization builds and operates the products (such as ChatGPT & Codex) that bring our cutting‑edge research to millions of users and developers worldwide.

The Applied Foundations team owns the core product and platform layers that make those experiences possible — from identity & access, to safety to payments & commerce across all of our apps. Our teams span product engineering, infrastructure, and safety, working together to deliver technology that is reliable, secure, and trusted at global scale.

About the Role

We’re hiring Backend Software Engineers to design and implement safe services and infrastructure that power our core products.

What You’ll Do

• Architect, build, and improve scalable backend systems and APIs.
• Drive performance, reliability, and safety across distributed services.
• Implement data storage, retrieval, compute, and integration solutions.
• Participate in long‑term architectural planning and technical design reviews.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional teams to design solutions that protect against and mitigate adversarial attacks without compromising user experience.

You Might Thrive Here If You

• Have strong experience with distributed systems, APIs, and backend languages (e.g., Go, Python, Rust, C++).
• Have experience setting up and maintaining production backend services and data pipelines.
• Have a humble attitude, an eagerness to help your colleagues, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed.
• Enjoy building resilient services that handle large scale and complexity.
• Are self‑directed and enjoy figuring out the best way to solve a particular problem.
• Own problems end‑to‑end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you’re missing to get the job done.

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.

Compensation

$185,000 – $385,000 + Offers Equity