Data Scientist, API

Details

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity. The API organization builds the infrastructure and developer platform that enables developers to bring powerful AI into products and services at scale. The team makes the platform reliable, safe, and easy to operate, enabling thousands of teams to create capabilities for millions of end users.

This role is based in San Francisco and uses a hybrid work model (three days in the office per week). Relocation assistance is offered to new employees.

Responsibilities

• Own the core KPI framework for the API platform, spanning developer adoption, engagement, retention, and platform health.
• Build end-to-end funnels that identify where developers succeed or get stuck—from first integration through scaling to production.
• Define and operationalize platform guardrails (e.g., reliability, latency, error rates, cost/efficiency) and connect them to user outcomes.
• Design and evaluate experiments and rollouts to quantify the impact of platform and product changes.
• Partner with product and engineering teams to improve instrumentation, data quality, and metric definitions so decisions are fast and correct.
• Translate complex analysis into clear, actionable insights for leadership and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Develop and socialize dashboards, tools, and self-serve data products that help teams answer product questions quickly.
• Help establish data science standards and best practices for measuring AI platform performance and developer success.
• Partner with other data scientists across the company to share learnings and raise the bar on measurement and decision-making.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in data science roles within product or technology organizations (platform or developer-facing experience is a plus).
• Expertise in statistics and causal inference, applied in both experimentation and observational studies.
• Expert-level SQL and proficiency in Python for analytics, modeling, and experimentation.
• Proven experience designing and interpreting experiments and making statistically sound recommendations.
• Experience building datasets, metrics, and data pipelines that power production decision-making.
• Experience developing and extracting insights from business intelligence tools (e.g., Tableau) and building self-serve solutions.
• Strong product sense and an impact-driven mindset: ability to turn ambiguity into crisp frameworks that drive roadmap decisions.
• Ability to build relationships with diverse stakeholders and cultivate strong partnerships across Product, Engineering, Research, and GTM teams.
• Strong communication skills, including the ability to bridge technical and non-technical audiences.
• Ability to operate effectively in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment with limited structure.
• Regular, proactive use of the latest AI tools to increase throughput and create durable team workflows.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with developer platforms, APIs/SDKs, or usage-based products.
• Experience with platform reliability analytics, incident impact measurement, or performance/cost optimization.
• Familiarity with AI evaluation and quality measurement systems (online/offline evals, human-in-the-loop, safety/quality guardrails).

Why it matters

When developers build on OpenAI, they put the platform into products that touch millions of people. API Data Science ensures the company makes the right bets, operates with rigor, and continuously raises reliability and usability as the platform scales.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company emphasizes safety and inclusion and provides applicant accommodations and background-check processes consistent with applicable law.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance 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 coordinated office closures, plus paid sick or safe time
• Mental health and wellness support
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend
• Daily meals in offices and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits (charitable donation matching, wellness stipends)