About the Team
OpenAI’s B2B Engineering team brings our most capable technology to the world through our developer platform and enterprise products. We build the backend systems, APIs, and infrastructure that power how developers and organizations use OpenAI in production.
Our work spans distributed systems, data infrastructure, platform services, and enterprise-grade capabilities like security, compliance, authentication, and reliability. We partner closely with product, research, design, infrastructure, and forward-deployed teams to turn cutting-edge AI capabilities into scalable, dependable products.
About the Role
We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer to design and scale the systems that power our developer and enterprise-facing products. You’ll lead the architecture of backend services and platform capabilities that bring new AI functionality into production safely, reliably, and at global scale.
This role spans a broad technical surface area, including distributed systems, APIs, databases, data pipelines, and secure enterprise infrastructure. You’ll help shape both the technical foundation and the product experience of our platform, with a high bar for performance, safety, reliability, and API design.
In this role, you will
- Design, build, and scale the backend services, APIs, and infrastructure that power OpenAI’s developer and enterprise products
- Lead the architecture of distributed systems, databases, and data pipelines that support large-scale, high-reliability production workloads
- Own major platform capabilities end-to-end, from early technical strategy and design through implementation, launch, and long-term operation
- Shape the design of our APIs with care and intentionality, treating API interfaces as core product surfaces and driving a high-quality developer experience
- Build secure, reliable, and compliant systems that meet the needs of both enterprise and developer use cases
- Partner closely with product, research, design, infrastructure, and forward-deployed engineering teams to bring new capabilities into production
- Drive technical direction across complex problem spaces, making sound architectural tradeoffs that balance speed, quality, and long-term maintainability
- Improve engineering velocity by building internal tooling, platform abstractions, and systems that increase leverage across the broader organization
- Raise the bar for engineering quality, system design, operational excellence, and technical decision-making across teams
- Help identify and solve ambiguous, high-impact technical problems that cut across multiple systems and stakeholders
You might thrive in this role if you
- Have significant experience building, scaling, and evolving production backend systems in fast-moving environments
- Bring deep expertise in software engineering fundamentals, distributed systems, and API design
- Are proficient in one or more backend languages such as Python, Go, Rust, or TypeScript
- Have a track record of leading complex technical initiatives and driving architecture across teams or critical product areas
- Care deeply about reliability, safety, security, and performance in production environments
- Have strong product instincts and a high bar for developer experience and interface design
- Are comfortable working in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and can create clarity where little exists
- Own problems end-to-end and are eager to learn whatever is needed to solve them
- Build thoughtfully, move with urgency, and collaborate effectively across disciplines
- Influence technical direction through strong judgment, clear communication, and consistently high-quality execution
- Have experience as a founder or early engineer at a startup, or have built products and platforms from scratch
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.
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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.