OpenAI

Backend Software Engineer, GTM Innovation

OpenAI • $150K — $180K *
Enterprise Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 6+ years of experience in software engineering focused on applied AI or user-facing systems
  • Experience in founding or working as an early engineer in a startup environment is a plus
  • Familiarity with sales technology or enterprise knowledge work automation
  • Adaptability in software development practices with evolving coding models
  • Demonstrated initiative and a strong sense of ownership
  • Ability to collaborate with end users and build products from inception
  • A curious and driven mindset focused on impactful AI innovations

Responsibilities

  • Build and scale durable agent runtimes and workflow orchestration systems
  • Design context and memory systems for effective agent functioning
  • Develop evaluation frameworks and feedback loops for agent quality enhancement
  • Collaborate with sales and technical teams to identify and solve key problems
  • Build backend services and data pipelines for agent action across workflows
  • Partner with product and research teams to improve agent capabilities
  • Transform real-world production insights into platform upgrades

Benefits

  • Work at the forefront of AI technology
  • Collaborative and innovative work environment
  • Opportunity to shape the future of AI
  • High-ownership role with significant impact
  • Engagement with cross-functional teams including sales and research
Full Job Description
About the Role

We're looking for a product-minded backend engineer to build the systems behind a new generation of AI coworkers: persistent agents that understand their environment, take on meaningful work, and improve over time.

You'll design and ship the foundational infrastructure that makes these agents effective in production, from durable workflow orchestration to long-running agent loops built on the Codex harness to the context, memory, tools, and permissions model they need to act reliably. You'll also build rigorous evaluation, observability, and feedback systems that make agent quality measurable and continuously improve how these systems perform.

This is a hands-on, high-ownership role at the intersection of agent infrastructure, applied AI, and product engineering. You'll work directly with go-to-market teams and collaborate across OpenAI's product and research organizations to turn ambiguous, real-world needs into dependable systems that help OpenAI meet the world at scale.

In this role, you will:
  • Build and scale durable agent runtimes, long-running agent loops, and workflow orchestration using the Codex harness and emerging agent infrastructure.
  • Design context and memory systems that ground agents in the information they need while preserving clear access boundaries.
  • Develop rigorous evaluation frameworks, production feedback loops, and observability to measure agent quality and improve it over time.
  • Partner directly with Sales, Technical Success, and Revenue Operations to identify high-value problems and own solutions from prototype through production.
  • Build reliable backend services, data pipelines, and integrations that enable agents to take meaningful action across real-world workflows.
  • Collaborate with OpenAI's Product and Research teams to advance agent capabilities and turn production learnings into platform improvements.


You'll thrive in this role if you:
  • Have 6+ years of experience as a software engineer working on applied AI or user-facing systems
  • Former founder, or early engineer at a startup who built a product from scratch is a plus
  • Domain experience or demonstrated interest in sales technology or enterprise knowledge work automation
  • Continually reinvent your software development process as coding models and developer tools improve
  • Take initiative, move quickly, and operate with a strong sense of ownership
  • Enjoy working closely with end users and shaping 01 products
  • Are collaborative, curious, and motivated to make an outsized impact at the frontier of AI


At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. The company was founded in 2015 by a group of technology leaders, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and John Schulman. OpenAI's mission is to develop and promote friendly AI for the betterment of humanity. The company has developed a number of cutting-edge AI technologies, including GPT-3, a language processing system that can generate human-like text. OpenAI has received funding from a number of high-profile investors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Learn more about OpenAI
Size
100 employees
Industry
Founded
2015

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