Software Engineer, Backend

OpenAI • San Francisco, CA

92d

About The Position

OpenAI’s Applications Engineering organization builds and operates the products that bring our cutting-edge research to millions of users and developers worldwide. We power products such as ChatGPT, the OpenAI API, and emerging AI-native applications. Our teams span product engineering, infrastructure, and safety, working together to ensure that OpenAI’s technology is delivered with reliability, security, and a world-class user experience. We’re looking for backend engineers to design and scale the systems that drive our customer-facing products. In this role, you’ll architect and maintain the services and infrastructure that power OpenAI applications—from large-scale distributed systems and databases to APIs and data pipelines. You’ll collaborate closely with product, research, and infrastructure teams to bring new AI capabilities to production while ensuring performance, safety, and compliance at global scale.

Requirements

• Up to 6 years of professional software engineering experience.
• Proficient in one or more backend languages (e.g., Python, Go, Rust, or similar) and distributed systems concepts.
• Enjoy building infrastructure that supports billions of requests and petabytes of data.
• Care deeply about reliability, safety, and performance in production environments.

Responsibilities

• Design and build robust backend services and APIs that power products like ChatGPT and the OpenAI API.
• Develop scalable data pipelines and storage systems for high-volume, low-latency workloads.
• Improve system reliability, observability, and security across production environments.
• Collaborate with product and research teams to translate cutting-edge AI into dependable, user-ready features.
• Participate in an on-call rotation to maintain uptime and respond to critical incidents.

What This Job Offers

• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees