Backend Software Engineer, Applied Foundations

Details

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.

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.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
• 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
• Mental health and wellness support
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
• Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.