Backend Software Engineer, Applied Foundations

OpenAI OpenAI · AI Frontier · San Francisco, CA · Applied AI

Backend Software Engineer role focused on building and operating the core product and platform layers for AI applications like ChatGPT and Codex. The role involves designing and implementing scalable, reliable, and safe backend systems, APIs, and data infrastructure, with a strong emphasis on performance, security, and mitigating adversarial attacks. This is a general backend engineering role within an AI company, not directly building AI models.

What you'd actually do

  1. Architect, build, and improve scalable backend systems and APIs.
  2. Drive performance, reliability, and safety across distributed services.
  3. Implement data storage, retrieval, compute, and integration solutions.
  4. Participate in long-term architectural planning and technical design reviews.
  5. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design solutions that protect against and mitigate adversarial attacks without compromising user experience.

Skills

Required

  • distributed systems
  • APIs
  • backend languages (e.g., Go, Python, Rust, C++)
  • setting up and maintaining production backend services
  • data pipelines

Nice to have

  • humble attitude
  • eagerness to help your colleagues
  • desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed
  • building resilient services that handle large scale and complexity
  • self-directed
  • figuring out the best way to solve a particular problem
  • Own problems end-to-end
  • willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done

What the JD emphasized

  • safe services
  • safety
  • protect against and mitigate adversarial attacks