Staff / Senior Staff Backend Software Engineer, Workspace Agents

OpenAI•San Francisco, CA

1d•$230,000 - $385,000

About The Position

The Workspace Agents team builds the product and platform foundations that bring powerful, reliable agents into ChatGPT workspaces. The team recently launched Workspace Agents in ChatGPT, enabling organizations to create agents tailored to their workflows and make them available directly within ChatGPT for employees to use across day-to-day work. Our work sits at the intersection of agentic product development, enterprise workflows, and backend infrastructure. We build the systems that help agents operate effectively in real business environments — grounding them in organizational context, connecting them to workplace tools and processes, and making them scalable, trustworthy, and useful across entire companies. The team partners closely across product, design, research, and engineering to turn rapidly evolving model capabilities into durable enterprise experiences. We move quickly, stay close to customer needs, and take broad ownership of an emerging product area that will shape how organizations use AI agents at work. We’re looking for backend engineers to help build the systems behind Workspace Agents and scale them for use across businesses. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys working on product-critical backend infrastructure in an ambiguous, fast-moving environment where both the technical architecture and customer experience are still evolving. You’ll help design and build the backend foundations that make agents configurable, reliable, and production-ready within enterprise workspaces. Strong candidates will bring deep backend engineering ability, strong product judgment, and the versatility to work across distributed systems, agent platform primitives, and enterprise product requirements.

Requirements

7+ years of professional backend engineering experience, ideally in product-driven, infrastructure-heavy, or enterprise-oriented environments
Proficient in one or more backend languages (e.g., Python, Go, Rust, or similar) and distributed systems concepts.
Strong backend engineering fundamentals, including distributed systems, service architecture, APIs, data modeling, reliability, performance, and production operations
Experience building scalable product systems that serve complex workflows, multi-user environments, or enterprise customers
Comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-moving settings where requirements evolve quickly and technical ownership is broad
Ability to move quickly, make pragmatic tradeoffs, and balance near-term product iteration with long-term system quality
High agency, strong execution velocity, and a willingness to work across boundaries as the team defines and scales a new product area

Nice To Haves

Experience with enterprise software, workflow automation, platform products, integrations, or trust-sensitive systems is a plus
Interest in AI agents, workplace productivity, and building the backend systems that help organizations adopt and benefit from frontier model capabilities

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate backend systems that power Workspace Agents in ChatGPT and support adoption across organizations
Develop core infrastructure that helps agents become more reliable, configurable, extensible, and effective in real workplace environments
Build systems that connect agentic experiences to enterprise context, workflows, and tools while maintaining strong product quality and operational trust
Work across technical challenges spanning agent orchestration, backend APIs, enterprise integrations, workspace-scale systems, and product foundations
Partner closely with product, design, research, and engineering stakeholders to translate fast-moving model and customer insights into scalable product capabilities
Help shape the technical direction of a high-priority, rapidly evolving product area at the center of OpenAI’s enterprise product strategy
Operate with high ownership in a small, execution-oriented team where priorities may shift quickly and engineers are expected to drive meaningful end-to-end outcomes