Software Engineer, API Safety

Details

OpenAI's API Platform turns frontier research into reliable capabilities that developers use to build products and services. The API Safety team designs APIs and systems that help developers share usage context, understand safety events, and apply safeguards tailored to application risk profiles. The team partners with API, Integrity, and Safety Research teams to support the safe deployment of frontier models.

The role focuses on solving production challenges, designing product experiences and safeguards, and balancing developer experience, latency, reliability, and risk.

Responsibilities

• Design and build dashboards and APIs for safety controls and customer-facing observability.
• Develop scalable systems that extend trusted safety capabilities to new use cases, customers, and deployment environments.
• Partner with Safety Research and Integrity to build safeguards that mitigate emerging risks.
• Be responsible for the availability, latency, and scalability of safeguards across high-volume API traffic.
• Own projects from technical design and implementation through launch and ongoing iteration.
• Raise the team's engineering standards.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional experience, excluding internships, in backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering roles.
• A track record of designing, building, and operating production backend services, developer-facing APIs, or distributed systems.
• Strong software engineering and systems fundamentals, with experience leading technically complex projects from ambiguous ideas to production.
• Proficiency in one or more general-purpose backend languages, such as Python, Go, Rust, or TypeScript.
• Experience building reliable, scalable systems and reasoning about distributed architecture, concurrency, latency, observability, and operational tradeoffs.
• Product judgment and developer empathy, including the ability to turn complex model or infrastructure capabilities into clear, intuitive APIs.
• Clear communication and a collaborative approach to working with researchers, product managers, designers, infrastructure engineers, and customers.
• Experience with observability, abuse prevention, trust and safety, identity, security, privacy, compliance, or risk systems is a strong plus.
• Interest in helping frontier AI reach more developers and businesses responsibly.

Benefits

• Equity and performance-related bonuses for eligible employees.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health, dependent care, and commuter expenses.
• 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.
• Mental health and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily meals in offices and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional benefits may include charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.