Staff / Senior Staff Backend Software Engineer

About the Team OpenAI’s mission is to make AGI beneficial for all of humanity and our mission is successful only if AGI drives real benefits across all industries in the world. Our goal in B2B applications is to enable this mission by helping businesses, enterprises & governments redefine how they operate to empower people and accelerate economic growth. We build and operate the products that bring our cutting-edge research to millions of companies and developers worldwide. We power the OpenAI API and the Enterprise products that empower people around the world to do their jobs better and more efficiently. Our teams span product engineering, backend infrastructure, and safety, working together to ensure that OpenAI’s technology is delivered with reliability, security, and a world-class user experience. About the Role We’re looking for backend engineers to design and scale the systems that drive our developer and enterprise-facing products. In this role, you’ll architect and maintain the services and infrastructure that power OpenAI applications—from large-scale distributed systems and databases to APIs and data pipelines. You’ll collaborate closely with product, research, and infrastructure teams to bring new AI capabilities to production while ensuring performance, safety, and compliance at global scale. In this role, you will: Own the end-to-end development lifecycle for new platform capabilities and integrations with other systems Collaborate closely with product, design and external customers to understand problems and implement effective solutions Work with the research team to improve our next generation of models Your background might look something like: 9+ years of professional engineering experience (excluding internships) in relevant roles at tech and product-driven companies Former founder, or early engineer at a startup who has built a product from scratch is a plus Proficiency in one or more backend languages (e.g., Python, Go, Rust, Typescript or similar) and distributed systems concepts. Enjoy building infrastructure that supports billions of requests and petabytes of data. Care deeply about reliability, safety, and performance in production environments. Interest in AI/ML (direct experience not required) Proven ability to thrive in fast-growing, product-driven companies by effectively navigating loosely defined tasks and managing competing priorities or deadlines. Title note: At OpenAI, research and engineering hires share the internal title Member of Technical Staff . We use Senior Staff 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. 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. For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement . 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. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form . No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link . OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy At OpenAI,