Description
Compensation
$293K – $385K • 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.
About the Team
API Agents builds the shared agent harness, tools, and infrastructure that turn OpenAI’s frontier models into systems that can reliably complete real work. We carry the capabilities behind Codex into a much broader set of products and workflows across software engineering, research, finance, healthcare, enterprise operations, and more. Our work spans search and connected context, computer use, memory, delegation and multi-agent coordination, and safe execution.
About the Role
We are looking for an experienced backend software engineer to build the core systems behind the next generation of agents. You will design reliable services and abstractions that help agents find the right context, use tools and computers, retain knowledge, coordinate over long-running workflows, and take action safely. The role combines deep backend and infrastructure work with strong product judgment, with opportunities to work across agent runtimes, orchestration, search, execution environments, identity and permissions, observability, and evaluations.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate the shared agent harness and backend infrastructure that power long-running, high-value workflows across OpenAI and third-party products.
- Build reusable capabilities across search and connected context, computer use, memory, tool execution, delegation, subagents, and multi-agent orchestration.
- Establish the foundations agents need to operate safely in production, including secure execution environments, identity and permissions, observability, evaluations, reliability, and cost and latency efficiency.
- Partner with Research, Codex, infrastructure, applied product teams, and external developers to translate model progress, traces, evaluations, and real workflow needs into shared capabilities and measurable gains in task completion, cost, and latency.
Requirements
- 7+ years of professional engineering experience, excluding internships, in relevant backend, infrastructure, platform, or product-driven engineering roles.
- Exceptional backend engineering fundamentals and a track record of leading complex systems from ambiguous problem statements to reliable production services.
- Proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript, or similar, with the ability to move comfortably across service, platform, and product boundaries.
- Strong systems design and operational judgment across distributed systems, APIs, workflow orchestration, search or storage, compute and execution, identity and permissions, or observability and reliability.
- Infrastructure depth paired with product judgment: you can abstract complex systems into simple, durable primitives that other engineers and developers can build on.
- Strong developer empathy and communication skills, including experience partnering with users, research teams, and product engineers to make fast-moving capabilities useful and dependable.
- High agency and comfort operating in a fast-moving environment, with strong ownership of security, reliability, and operational excellence.