Software Engineer, Backend - job 1 of 6

About the Team

OpenAI’s Applications Engineering organization builds and operates the products that bring our cutting-edge research to millions of users and developers worldwide. We power products such as ChatGPT, the OpenAI API, and emerging AI-native applications. Our teams span product engineering, 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 customer-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:

• Design and build robust backend services and APIs that power products like ChatGPT and the OpenAI API.

• Develop scalable data pipelines and storage systems for high-volume, low-latency workloads.

• Improve system reliability, observability, and security across production environments.

• Collaborate with product and research teams to translate cutting-edge AI into dependable, user-ready features.

• Participate in an on-call rotation to maintain uptime and respond to critical incidents.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have up to 6 years of professional software engineering experience.

• Are proficient in one or more backend languages (e.g., Python, Go, Rust, 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.

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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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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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.