Description
Location
San Francisco
Employment Type
Full time
Department
Consumer Products
Compensation
- $293K – $325K • Offers Equity
The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
- Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
- 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
- Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
- Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
- 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
- Mental health and wellness support
- Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
- Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
- Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
- Relocation support for eligible employees
- Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.
More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.
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.
About the Team
The Software Engineering team is responsible for designing and building the scalable, performant, and secure backend systems that power our products—from early prototypes to large-scale deployments. We collaborate closely with product, hardware, and full-stack teams to ensure our infrastructure enables fast iteration while setting a strong foundation for long-term growth.
About the Role
As a Backend Engineer, you will design and build services, APIs, and infrastructure that support evolving product needs. You’ll apply a deep understanding of backend systems and maintain enough end-to-end context—from hardware to cloud—to guide technical decisions that best serve the product and team.
We’re looking for engineers who thrive in fast-paced, collaborative environments and care deeply about building robust systems that scale.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of four days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role, you will:
- Architect, build, and maintain high-performance, secure backend systems.
- Design APIs, data models, and infrastructure to support evolving product needs.
- Balance near-term development velocity with long-term maintainability and scalability.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure cohesive, end-to-end solutions.
You might thrive in this role if you:
- Have 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a focus on backend systems.
- Have a proven track record of building and scaling systems from early stage to large scale.
- Are proficient with Python and Go, and familiar with a range of server-side technologies.
- Have a strong grasp of system design, performance optimization, and security best practices.
- Can reason about full-stack tradeoffs from hardware through cloud infrastructure.
- _(Nice to have)_ Have experience with distributed systems and cloud architectures.
- _(Nice to have)_ Bring a background in instrumentation, analytics, and performance tuning.
- _(Nice to have)_ Are familiar with hardware-cloud integrations or applied AI services.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.