Software Engineer - Cross-functional Systems

OpenAI • San Francisco, CA

19h

About The Position

As a Software Engineer on this team, you will design and build the software foundations that connect products, data, and internal workflows. You’ll work across systems, tooling, infrastructure, and product surfaces to make ambitious prototypes real, scalable, and robust.
You’ll have broad scope and meaningful influence: defining architecture, making build-vs-buy decisions, improving developer velocity, and helping take a project from early exploration to deployment and launch.

Requirements

• Extreme agency: you identify the highest-leverage problems and move them forward with minimal direction.
• Creativity and a founder mentality: you enjoy turning ambiguity into a concrete plan and shipping outcomes.
• Strong technical foundation and can make good architectural decisions under real constraints.
• A high bar for quality and details, especially around reliability, maintainability, and user/developer experience.
• Strong prioritization: you know when to go deep, when to simplify, and when to ship.
• Strong software engineering experience building and shipping production systems.
• Proficiency in at least one systems/product language (e.g., Python, C++, Rust, Go) and comfort learning new stacks.
• Experience designing APIs/services and working with distributed systems, performance, or reliability concerns.
• Track record of owning projects end-to-end: design → implementation → deployment → operations.

Responsibilities

• Building and owning core software components, from prototype through production.
• Driving technical design, implementation, deployment, and launch of key systems and services.
• Developing infrastructure and tooling that supports internal development workflows (e.g., data pipelines, evaluation, experiment tooling).
• Integrating software across systems, ensuring reliability, performance, and observability.
• Establishing pragmatic engineering standards (testing, CI/CD, release processes, operational playbooks) that enable rapid iteration without sacrificing quality.
• Troubleshooting complex end-to-end issues across system boundaries and improving system debuggability.
• Collaborating closely with cross-functional partners, communicating tradeoffs, and unblocking progress with a bias toward action.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed