Software Engineer, API Safety
About The Position
OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. The API Platform turns frontier research into reliable capabilities that developers use to build transformative products and services for people around the world. API Safety's goal is to ensure safe deployment of frontier models in the API. We design APIs and systems that help developers share usage context, understand safety events, and apply safeguards tailored to the risk profile of the applications they are building. This work is critical to our frontier model launches and partners closely with teams across API, Integrity, and Safety Research. We're looking for product-minded software engineers to join a team that is addressing emerging risks at the frontier of model development while building novel solutions for real-world AI deployment. The day-to-day work ranges from solving production challenges to designing new product experiences and safeguards. The right candidate is comfortable balancing tradeoffs across developer experience, latency, reliability, and risk.
Requirements
- 7+ years of professional experience, excluding internships, in backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering roles.
- A track record of designing, building, and operating production backend services, developer-facing APIs, or distributed systems.
- Strong software engineering and systems fundamentals, with experience leading technically complex projects from ambiguous ideas to production.
- Proficiency in one or more general-purpose backend languages, such as Python, Go, Rust, or TypeScript.
- Experience building reliable, scalable systems and reasoning about distributed architecture, concurrency, latency, observability, and operational tradeoffs.
- Product judgment and developer empathy, including an 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 is a strong plus.
- Interest in helping frontier AI reach more developers and businesses responsibly.
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.
- Be responsible for the availability, latency, and scalability of safeguards across high-volume API traffic.
- Own projects from technical design and implementation through launch and ongoing iteration, while raising the team’s engineering standards
Benefits
- 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.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
