Applied AI Engineer, Enterprise - EDU

Details

About the Team

OpenAI’s Applied AI Engineering team helps organizations across industries turn frontier AI into safe, reliable production systems that deliver meaningful business outcomes. The team works directly with customers’ engineering, product, security, and transformation teams to navigate complex architectures, data environments, governance requirements, and organization-wide change. Deployment lessons inform OpenAI products and reusable patterns that help customers move faster.

About the Role

As an Enterprise Applied AI Engineer, you will serve as a technical partner to leading organizations, including universities and other educational institutions, helping them turn ambitious AI use cases into durable production systems and adoption at scale. You will combine deep technical judgment with hands-on engineering to provide technical leadership on complex customer deployments.

You will write and debug code, build evaluation systems, resolve complex integrations, and guide decisions about model behavior, reliability, latency, cost, safety, security, governance, and operational readiness. Success is measured by durable production systems, sustained adoption, and meaningful business impact. Deployment experience will also influence how OpenAI’s products evolve.

The role may be based in New York City or San Francisco, or performed remotely. Office-based employees follow a hybrid work model with three days per week in the office. Relocation assistance is available to new employees.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, evaluate, and deploy AI systems from prototype through reliable production and scaled adoption.
• Partner with enterprise customers to identify high-value opportunities and translate them into technical architectures, implementation plans, evaluation strategies, and success criteria.
• Make technical decisions across model selection, agent and tool design, retrieval, context design, data pipelines, evaluation, reliability, observability, latency, cost, safety, security, and governance.
• Diagnose complex implementation challenges, reproduce failures, test hypotheses, and drive blockers to resolution.
• Partner with customers’ engineering teams and OpenAI’s Product, Research, Engineering, Security, and Go-to-Market teams.
• Create reusable architectures, tooling, playbooks, and technical guidance to accelerate future enterprise deployments.

Requirements

• Experience designing, building, and shipping AI or machine-learning systems in enterprise environments, from prototype to production.
• Substantial contributions through coding, architecture, evaluation, debugging, or production engineering.
• Relevant backgrounds may include applied AI or machine-learning engineering, forward-deployed engineering, software engineering, customer engineering, solutions architecture, or technical consulting.
• High proficiency in Python and comfort working across model APIs, agent and tool development, retrieval and data pipelines, evaluation, observability, integrations, and production operations.
• Experience with JavaScript, TypeScript, or another relevant language is valuable.
• Ability to evaluate AI systems systematically using representative data, automated graders, production signals, and human judgment.
• Experience with enterprise production requirements, including integrations, reliability, observability, security, privacy, data governance, performance, and cost.
• Experience with education or research environments, institutional data, privacy, access controls, and complex integrations is valuable.
• Ability to connect technical decisions to customer workflows, adoption, and measurable business outcomes.
• Clear and credible communication with hands-on engineers, technical leaders, security and product teams, and executives.
• End-to-end ownership, strong technical judgment, and the ability to work effectively through ambiguity.
• Experience working with education institutions, particularly universities, is preferred but not required. Prior OpenAI product experience is not required.

Compensation and Benefits

• Base salary: $251,000–$278,000 per year.
• Equity and performance-related bonuses may also be provided.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax Flexible Spending Accounts and commuter expense accounts.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, paid company holidays, and paid sick or safe time as required by law.
• Mental health and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily office meals and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional taxable fringe benefits may be provided.