Backend Engineer

About the Role

We’re hiring a backend engineer to design and build scalable, performant, and secure systems that power our products from early concepts through production scale. You’ll work across services, APIs, and infrastructure, making the right tradeoffs to deliver quickly while laying the groundwork for long‑term growth.

You’ll collaborate closely with product and full‑stack teams (and other cross‑functional partners), applying a deep understanding of backend systems and enough end‑to‑end context—from client/edge to cloud—to guide technical decisions that best serve the product and team.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. This role is fully onsite 5 days in office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Architect, build, and maintain high‑performance, secure backend systems.

• Design APIs, data models, and infrastructure to support evolving product needs.

• Balance near‑term velocity with long‑term maintainability and scalability.

• Collaborate with cross‑functional teams to ensure cohesive, end‑to‑end solutions.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• 7+ years professional software engineering experience, with a focus on backend systems.

• Proven track record building and scaling systems from early stage to production scale.

• Proficient with Python and Go, plus familiarity with a range of server‑side technologies.

• Strong grasp of system design, performance optimization, and security best practices.

• Ability to reason about full‑stack tradeoffs from client/edge through cloud infrastructure.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with distributed systems and cloud architectures.

• Background in instrumentation, analytics, and performance tuning.

• Familiarity with edge‑to‑cloud integrations or AI services.

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.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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.

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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.