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OpenAI Backend Engineering Jobs

Open backend engineering roles at OpenAI, pulled live from their hiring system.

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25 openOpenAIBackend Engineering

56% of open backend engineering roles call out Distributed Systems; Python and Kubernetes appear in roughly a third. Most of these backend engineering roles are on-site or hybrid; 0% are fully remote.

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Latest backend engineering roles at OpenAI
OpenAI

Software Engineer, Cloud Agents

Build and scale orchestration, sandboxing, and storage systems for long-running cloud agents powering Codex, ChatGPT, and the OpenAI API. Requires 9+ years experience leading large-scale backend or infrastructure projects.

293k – 385kSan Francisco, CABackend EngineeringHybridGoRust
OpenAI

Software Engineer, API SDK

Build and maintain OpenAI's official SDKs across Python, Node.js, Go, Java, and Ruby. Shape developer experience for new API features and drive SDK strategy and automation.

293k – 385kSan Francisco, CA +2Backend EngineeringHybridGoJava
OpenAI

Capacity Systems Software Engineer

Build backend services, APIs, and data platforms that serve as the system of record for OpenAI's compute capacity planning, forecasting, and operational decision-making across a global infrastructure footprint.

125k – 228kSan Francisco, CABackend EngineeringHybridGoSQL
OpenAI

Software Engineer, Enterprise AI Platform

Build internal AI-native apps, MCP connectors, multi-agent workflows, and reusable platform components for enterprise operations across Finance, People, and GTM. Strong Python, system design, enterprise integrations, and applied AI experience required.

230k – 385kSan Francisco, CABackend EngineeringOn-siteRAGAPIs
OpenAI

Staff+ Software Engineer, Identity Infrastructure Engineering

Leads architecture, development, and operation of secure identity infrastructure across cloud platforms and internal systems for OpenAI's research and engineering teams. Requires 10+ years experience with large-scale backend systems, identity/security tech, and languages like Go, Rust, Python.

293k – 385kSan Francisco, CABackend EngineeringHybridGoRust
OpenAI

Backend Software Engineer, Applied Foundations

Designs and implements scalable backend systems, APIs, and infrastructure powering core AI products like ChatGPT. Focuses on performance, reliability, safety at global scale, and mitigating adversarial attacks using languages like Go, Python, Rust.

185k – 385kSan Francisco, CABackend EngineeringOn-siteGoC++
OpenAI

Software Engineer, Foundations Retrieval

Software Engineer building and scaling retrieval infrastructure for AI models, including indexing, serving, and query execution systems. Partners with researchers to productionize embedding techniques and supports agentic workflows across OpenAI products.

380k – 555kSan Francisco, CABackend EngineeringOn-siteEmbeddingsML Systems
OpenAI

Software Engineer, Codex Core Agents

Builds infrastructure for AI agents in production, focusing on sandboxed code execution, orchestration, stateful workflows, and optimization for tokens, latency, reliability, and cost at scale. Requires strong distributed systems and infrastructure engineering experience.

230k – 325kSan Francisco, CA +2Backend EngineeringOn-siteAPIsLLMs
OpenAI

Principal Software Engineer, B2B Engineering

Leads architecture and scaling of backend services, APIs, distributed systems, databases, and data pipelines for OpenAI's developer platform and enterprise products. Requires deep expertise in backend engineering, reliability, security, and cross-team collaboration in fast-paced environments.

385k – 490kSan Francisco, CABackend EngineeringOn-siteGoRust
OpenAI

Software Engineer, Localization

Build and scale localization platforms, AI-powered translation pipelines, and internationalization libraries for OpenAI products. Requires strong backend/full-stack experience with Java, React, MySQL, and Kubernetes.

185k – 300kSan Francisco, CABackend EngineeringOn-siteAIJava
OpenAI

Senior Software Engineer, Product

Designs and builds experimentation and rollout infrastructure for safe feature launches and model evaluations at scale. Partners with product, research, and data teams to integrate systems into development lifecycles, focusing on developer experience and large-scale distributed systems.

293k – 324kBellevue, WA +1Backend EngineeringHybridrollout toolingfeature flagging
OpenAI

Software Engineer, Ads Monetization, Revenue Platform

Software Engineer building core monetization systems for ChatGPT Ads, handling end-to-end pipelines from event capture to billing. Requires 5+ years experience in distributed systems, data engineering, and financial accuracy.

230k – 385kSan Francisco, CABackend EngineeringOn-sitepipelinesmonitoring
OpenAI

Software Engineer, ChatGPT Infrastructure

Design and build infrastructure platforms for ChatGPT, focusing on scalability, reliability, and developer productivity. Requires experience with large-scale distributed systems, performance optimization, and creating reusable abstractions for engineering teams.

255k – 405kSan Francisco, CABackend EngineeringOn-siteCachingAPI Design
OpenAI

Software Engineer, Backend (Knowledge Innovation)

Builds and scales backend services and APIs for OpenAI's knowledge systems, integrating data and AI models into workflows. Requires 4+ years backend experience with Python, FastAPI, Postgres, and distributed systems.

230k – 385kSan Francisco, CABackend EngineeringOn-siteAPIsAI/ML
OpenAI

Software Engineer, Identity Infrastructure Engineering

Builds identity and access management infrastructure for multi-cloud security at OpenAI, protecting AI model weights and data. Requires strong Python/Go skills, cloud expertise (AWS/Azure/GCP), and security protocols like OAuth/SAML.

184k – 385kSan Francisco, CA +2Backend EngineeringHybridGoAWS
OpenAI

Backend Software Engineer, Growth

Backend engineer driving ChatGPT user growth through data analysis, product ideation, experimentation, and backend systems for optimizing account access, notifications, SEO, and virality. Requires analytical skills, A/B testing experience, and comfort with ambiguity.

185k – 385kSan Francisco, CABackend EngineeringOn-siteSEOSQL
OpenAI

Backend Engineer, Consumer Products

Designs and builds scalable backend services, APIs, and infrastructure for consumer products, balancing velocity and long-term scalability. Requires 7+ years experience with Python, Go, system design, and cross-functional collaboration.

293k – 325kSan Francisco, CABackend EngineeringHybridGoAPIs
OpenAI

Backend Software Engineer (Evals)

Build evals infrastructure and backend services for OpenAI's support automation, focusing on reliable pipelines, monitoring, and AI model integration. Requires 4+ years backend experience with Python, FastAPI, Postgres, and ML/LLM evals.

230k – 385kSan Francisco, CABackend EngineeringOn-siteAPIsPython
OpenAI

Software Engineer, Monetization Infrastructure (SF/Seattle)

Builds core backend infrastructure for OpenAI's monetization and ads systems, architecting large-scale distributed systems focused on reliability, privacy, performance, and security. Requires 10+ years experience in mission-critical systems.

230k – 385kSan Francisco, CA +1Backend EngineeringOn-siteAPIsPython
OpenAI

Software Engineer, Database Systems

Builds and optimizes high-performance distributed database systems like Rockset, focusing on ingestion, query execution, indexing, and storage. Requires 4+ years experience in scalable systems, C++ proficiency, and cloud expertise to enhance reliability and throughput at massive scale.

230k – 385kSan Francisco, CABackend EngineeringOn-siteC++AWS
OpenAI

Software Engineer, Core Services

Designs and operates critical backend platforms like caching, workflow orchestration, and metadata stores to enable scalable product development. Requires expertise in distributed systems, caching (Redis/Memcached), storage (FoundationDB), and orchestration (Temporal).

230k – 385kSan Francisco, CABackend EngineeringHybridRedisCI/CD
OpenAI

Software Engineer, Agent Infrastructure

Builds and scales infrastructure for training and deploying AI agents, including novel container orchestration beyond Kubernetes, FastAPI/gRPC APIs, and Terraform-based systems. Collaborates with researchers on high-scale ML environments and production platforms for OpenAI products.

230k – 385kSan Francisco, CA +1Backend EngineeringHybridgRPCKata
OpenAI

Software Engineer, Privacy Infrastructure

Designs and operates scalable data infrastructure for privacy, legal compliance, and security workflows, including secure storage, search services, and automated data transfers. Partners with Legal, Security, and engineering teams to build defensible systems handling large-scale data problems.

230k – 325kSan Francisco, CABackend EngineeringHybridAWSGCP
OpenAI

Software Engineer, Compute - Storage

Build and operate storage infrastructure powering OpenAI's research and production, including object stores, cross-region data movement, lifecycle management, and federation layers on Kubernetes using Rust.

230k – 385kSan Francisco, CA +1Backend EngineeringHybridRustGrafana
OpenAI

Software Engineer, Collective Communication

Designs and implements custom networking collectives using C++ and CUDA for efficient AI model training on supercomputers. Requires expertise in low-level performance-critical software, RDMA distributed algorithms, and GPU/CPU code.

380k – 555kSan Francisco, CABackend EngineeringHybridC++CUDA