Senior Staff Software Engineer, Gov

Details

Join the engineering teams that bring OpenAI’s ideas safely to the world. The Applied Engineering team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to consumers and businesses while ensuring that it is used responsibly and safely.

This role involves solving complex, high-impact problems across the stack and deploying OpenAI technology into new environments and infrastructure that power critical public-sector missions. You will work cross-functionally with product, security, and compliance teams to build a scalable, reliable platform, and partner directly with customers to design and build products and features for real-world use cases.

The role includes launching new capabilities, optimizing inference in unique, high-stakes environments, and shaping the future of OpenAI technology for public-sector customers. Occasional travel to customer sites is required.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end development of new customer-facing ChatGPT and OpenAI API features, both on-premises and in the cloud, for public-sector customers.
• Partner and embed directly with engineering, security, compliance, and other business teams to enable products to work within the constraints of new environments.
• Talk to users to understand their problems and design solutions to address them.
• Work with the research team to gather feedback and iterate on the latest models, developing solutions for public-sector customers at both the model and data layers.
• Collaborate with engineers, researchers, product managers, designers, and operations teams to create products.
• Optimize applications for speed and scale.

Requirements

• US citizenship.
• At least 9 years of relevant engineering experience at technology and product-driven companies.
• Proficiency with JavaScript, React, and other web technologies.
• Proficiency with a backend language; Python is used at OpenAI.
• Some experience with infrastructure primitives such as Kubernetes and Terraform.
• Interest in AI/ML; direct experience is not required.
• Ability to move quickly in an environment where requirements may be loosely defined and priorities or deadlines may compete.
• Interest in enabling public-sector use cases with unique requirements.

At OpenAI, research and engineering hires share the internal title Member of Technical Staff. Senior Staff is used externally to signal the depth of experience, ownership, and technical leadership expected for this role.

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 committed to safety, equal employment opportunity, reasonable accommodations, and consideration of qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records in accordance with applicable laws. Background checks may be administered in accordance with applicable law.

Benefits

• Base salary of $207,000–$385,000 per year, plus equity.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health and dependent care expenses, as well as commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, paid company holidays, office closures, 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 benefits may include charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.