# Software Engineer, API Safety

**Company:** [OpenAI](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/openai)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $293k – $385k/yr
**Experience:** 7+ years
**Skills:** Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript, Backend Services, APIs, Distributed Systems, Concurrency, Latency, Observability, Abuse Prevention, Trust And Safety, Identity, Security, Privacy
**Posted:** 2026-08-21

> Build product-minded backend services, APIs, dashboards, and safeguards that enable safe deployment of frontier AI through the API. The role requires 7+ years of professional engineering experience, strong distributed-systems fundamentals, and excellent product and developer judgment.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Design and build dashboards and APIs for safety controls and customer-facing observability.
- Develop scalable systems that extend trusted safety capabilities to new use cases, customers, and deployment environments.
- Partner with Safety Research and Integrity to build safeguards that mitigate emerging risks.
- Own the availability, latency, and scalability of safeguards across high-volume API traffic.
- Lead projects from technical design and implementation through launch and ongoing iteration.
- Raise engineering standards across the team.

## Requirements
- 7+ years of professional experience, excluding internships, in backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering roles.
- Experience designing, building, and operating production backend services, developer-facing APIs, or distributed systems.
- Strong software engineering and systems fundamentals.
- Experience leading technically complex projects from ambiguous ideas to production.
- Proficiency in one or more general-purpose backend languages.
- Experience with distributed architecture, concurrency, latency, observability, and operational tradeoffs.
- Product judgment and developer empathy, including the ability to turn complex model or infrastructure capabilities into clear, intuitive APIs.
- Clear communication and a collaborative approach to working with researchers, product managers, designers, infrastructure engineers, and customers.

## Nice-to-haves
- Experience with observability, abuse prevention, trust and safety, identity, security, privacy, compliance, or risk systems.
- Interest in helping frontier AI reach more developers and businesses responsibly.

## Compensation
- Annual salary: **$293,000–$385,000**.

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