AI Deployment Engineer, Plugins

Details

The Ecosystem AI Deployment Engineering team supports strategic partners building high-quality technical integrations into ChatGPT and Codex. The role focuses on helping partners design, build, evaluate, submit, launch, and maintain high-utility plugins.

This is a hands-on, partner-facing product engineering role involving platform contributions, sophisticated partner engagements, and the translation of ambiguous product needs into production-ready integrations. The engineer will work with partner product and engineering teams as well as OpenAI's product, engineering, partnerships, legal, policy, design, and go-to-market teams.

The role is based in the San Francisco office and follows a hybrid work model requiring three days per week in the office.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical partner journey for priority B2B plugins, from pitch and readiness assessment through architecture, build, evaluation, submission, launch, and ongoing maintenance.
• Identify strong plugin use cases, define user journeys and expected behaviors, and help partners focus on workflows where ChatGPT or Codex can create meaningful user value.
• Write production and sample code, build prototypes and reference implementations, and create technical guidance, evaluations, launch checklists, and debugging tools.
• Debug API contracts, OAuth and login flows, tool invocation, latency, retries, rate limits, observability, data models, and user-experience issues across partner and OpenAI systems.
• Review partner architectures and implementation plans for API design, scopes and permissions, data handling, safety, privacy, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
• Contribute targeted fixes and improvements to ChatGPT, Codex, and the plugins platform, including APIs, SDKs, documentation, examples, internal tooling, partner debugging workflows, and launch guardrails.
• Work with product, engineering, design, partnerships, legal, policy, support, and go-to-market teams to make partner launches smooth and repeatable.
• Bring structured feedback from partners to product and engineering teams and turn successful launch patterns into reusable playbooks, examples, platform requirements, and implementation guidance.

Requirements

• 4–6 years of professional software engineering experience.
• Experience building and operating production APIs, backend services, developer platforms, applications, plugins, connectors, or integrations.
• Ability to reason across frontend, backend, authentication, reliability, privacy, evaluations, and user-experience constraints.
• Strong product sense and the ability to distinguish between a plugin that works technically and one that is genuinely useful to users.
• Clear communication skills with external engineers, product leaders, executives, and internal cross-functional stakeholders.
• Ability to turn ambiguous partner ideas into runnable prototypes, API contracts, technical specifications, and pragmatic implementation guidance.
• Comfort reading unfamiliar code, making targeted platform changes, and debugging distributed systems using logs, traces, metrics, and experiments.
• Strong concern for user trust, privacy, data handling, and product quality in AI-powered experiences.
• Ability to balance urgency with sound judgment and attention to important details.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with OAuth and login flows, API design, webhooks, schemas, rate limits, observability, SDKs, and production launch operations.
• Customer-facing or partner-facing engineering experience, including leading technical calls, navigating ambiguity, and helping external teams ship production software.
• Familiarity with AI products, LLM APIs, tool calling, MCP, ChatGPT or Codex surfaces, developer platforms, or marketplace ecosystems.
• Ability to make targeted changes across backend services, frontend surfaces, SDKs, documentation, internal tools, or monorepo codebases.
• Strong written communication skills, including documentation, implementation notes, launch plans, and partner-facing technical guidance.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

Benefits

• Base salary range of $197,000–$280,000 per year.
• Equity, performance-related bonuses for eligible employees, and medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Health Savings Accounts, Flexible Spending Accounts, commuter benefits, and a 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, caregiver, and sick or safe leave.
• Flexible paid time off for exempt employees and up to 15 paid days annually for non-exempt employees.
• Paid company holidays and coordinated office closures.
• Mental health and wellness support, employer-paid basic life and disability coverage, and an annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily office meals and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation assistance for eligible employees.