Software Engineer - Cross-functional Systems

About the Team

We’re a small, fast-moving team building a new initiative at the intersection of software and systems, with close collaboration across product and infrastructure. We operate like a startup inside the organization: high ownership, tight feedback loops, and an emphasis on shipping real systems that work end-to-end. We partner closely across research, product, and engineering to turn early concepts into reliable, production-grade capabilities.

As a Software Engineer on this team, you will design and build the software foundations that connect products, data, and internal workflows. You’ll work across systems, tooling, infrastructure, and product surfaces to make ambitious prototypes real, scalable, and robust.

You’ll have broad scope and meaningful influence: defining architecture, making build-vs-buy decisions, improving developer velocity, and helping take a project from early exploration to deployment and launch.

• Building and owning core software components, from prototype through production.

• Driving technical design, implementation, deployment, and launch of key systems and services.

• Developing infrastructure and tooling that supports internal development workflows (e.g., data pipelines, evaluation, experiment tooling).

• Integrating software across systems, ensuring reliability, performance, and observability.

• Establishing pragmatic engineering standards (testing, CI/CD, release processes, operational playbooks) that enable rapid iteration without sacrificing quality.

• Troubleshooting complex end-to-end issues across system boundaries and improving system debuggability.

• Collaborating closely with cross-functional partners, communicating tradeoffs, and unblocking progress with a bias toward action.

• Extreme agency: you identify the highest-leverage problems and move them forward with minimal direction.

• Creativity and a founder mentality: you enjoy turning ambiguity into a concrete plan and shipping outcomes.

• Strong technical foundation and can make good architectural decisions under real constraints.

• A high bar for quality and details, especially around reliability, maintainability, and user/developer experience.

• Strong prioritization: you know when to go deep, when to simplify, and when to ship.

• Strong software engineering experience building and shipping production systems.

• Proficiency in at least one systems/product language (e.g., Python, C++, Rust, Go) and comfort learning new stacks.

• Experience designing APIs/services and working with distributed systems, performance, or reliability concerns.

• Track record of owning projects end-to-end: design → implementation → deployment → operations.

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…