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OpenAI

Backend Software Engineer, Applied Foundations

San Francisco
Salary
$266K - $445K
Level
Mid
Work type
Hybrid · San Francisco

Not stated in the posting: visa.

Open. First seen 8 May 2026.

Apply on the company's site →

About the role

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.

OpenAI's standard text

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, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

What this role asks for

Standard for backend roles

Python

Common in backend postings at any company.

54% of this description is written for the role. The rest is OpenAI's standard text, folded away below.

Read against OpenAI's other open postings on this site.

The team: Applied AI Engineering HIRES STEADILY

This role is one of 67 open in Applied AI Engineering. 20 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in September: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.

WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS

Python (20 of 67), Machine Learning (14 of 67), React (9 of 67), TypeScript (9 of 67), Android (7 of 67), Golang (7 of 67), Kotlin (6 of 67)

OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM

From the team and dates on OpenAI's own job board.

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