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OpenAI

Backend Software Engineer, Applied Foundations

OpenAI
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onsite mid Full time $185K – $385K San Francisco

First indexed 8 May 2026

Description

We're hiring Backend Software Engineers to design and implement safe services and infrastructure that power our core products.

As a Backend Software Engineer on the Applied Foundations team, you will:

Architect, build, and improve scalable backend systems and APIs. Drive performance, reliability, and safety across distributed services. Implement data storage, retrieval, compute, and integration solutions. Participate in long-term architectural planning and technical design reviews. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design solutions that protect against and mitigate adversarial attacks without compromising user experience.

You might thrive here if you:

Have strong experience with distributed systems, APIs, and backend languages (e.g., Go, Python, Rust, C++). Have experience setting up and maintaining production backend services and data pipelines. Have a humble attitude, an eagerness to help your colleagues, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed. Enjoy building resilient services that handle large scale and complexity. Are self-directed and enjoy figuring out the best way to solve a particular problem. Own problems end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done.

This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.

This listing is enriched and indexed by YubHub. To apply, use the employer's original posting: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/b398e1c6-0c32-4464-bb34-6ccda901b688