Staff / Senior Staff Backend Software Engineer

About the Team
OpenAI's mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity. Bringing that mission to life requires products and infrastructure that make advanced AI useful, reliable, and safe for people, developers, companies, and institutions around the world.

Our product engineering teams build and operate the systems that connect OpenAI's research to real-world use. This includes the OpenAI API, ChatGPT, enterprise offerings, and platform services that support secure, compliant, high-quality experiences at scale. We work across engineering, product, design, research, infrastructure, safety, and go-to-market teams to help users and organizations apply AI to meaningful work.

About the Role

We are looking for backend engineers to design and scale the systems behind OpenAI's products and platforms. In this role, you will build the services, data systems, APIs, and infrastructure that help bring new AI capabilities into production.

You will work on distributed systems that need to be reliable, secure, observable, and performant while collaborating closely with product, research, and infrastructure teams to support a broad set of user, developer, and enterprise needs.

In this role, you will:

• Own the end-to-end development lifecycle for backend platform capabilities, integrations, and product infrastructure.
• Architect and operate services, APIs, data pipelines, and storage systems that support OpenAI products at global scale.
• Collaborate with product, design, research, infrastructure, safety, and customer-facing teams to understand needs and deliver effective solutions.
• Build with reliability, security, privacy, compliance, and model safety in mind.
• Work with research and product teams to bring next-generation model capabilities into production experiences.

Your background might look something like:

• 7+ years of professional engineering experience, excluding internships, in relevant roles at technology and product-driven companies.
• Experience leading large-scale backend, platform, or infrastructure projects from ambiguous problem statements to production systems.
• Proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript, or similar.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, API design, data modeling, observability, and operational excellence.
• Enjoy building infrastructure that can support billions of requests, large volumes of data, and demanding reliability requirements.
• Care deeply about safety, privacy, security, performance, and quality in production environments.
• Interest in AI/ML; direct AI/ML experience is helpful but not required.
• Proven ability to navigate loosely defined work, manage competing priorities, and make sound technical tradeoffs in a fast-moving environment.
• Former founder or early engineer experience building a product from scratch is a plus.

Title note: At OpenAI, research and engineering hires share the internal title Member of Technical Staff . We use Staff / Senior Staff externally to signal the depth of experience, ownership, and technical leadership expected for this role.

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.

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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.