OpenAI

Principal Software Engineer, Enterprise Technology Vertical

OpenAI$160K — $200K *
Enterprise Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 10+ years of experience building production software with a strong product judgment.
  • Proficient in full-stack development with modern frontend (React, TypeScript) and backend (Python, Go, Node.js) technologies.
  • Demonstrated ability to architect and implement complex and distributed systems, focusing on APIs and secure data flows.
  • Experience with operational excellence in business-critical production systems and incident response.
  • A track record of delivering AI-integrated products and understanding the reliability challenges in probabilistic systems.

Responsibilities

  • Set technical direction and design critical components for AI-based enterprise workflows.
  • Translate customer needs into actionable product strategies with clear milestones.
  • Lead initiatives across multiple cross-functional teams, facilitating key technical decisions.
  • Architect systems for safe operations of probabilistic AI experiences, focusing on security and reliability.
  • Own the entire product lifecycle from ideation to customer feedback and iteration.
  • Define technical contracts and promote reusable patterns to enhance engineering standards.

Benefits

  • Collaborative work environment focusing on innovation and customer impact.
  • Opportunities to shape the technical direction of enterprise AI products.
  • Potential for influential role within cross-functional teams without traditional management responsibilities.
  • Chance to work on cutting-edge AI technology that drives real customer solutions.
Full Job Description
About the Role

We are looking for an exceptionally experienced, hands-on full-stack engineer to define and build the next generation of AI-powered enterprise workflows. You will take on the hardest and most ambiguous problems in the Technology vertical: translating real customer needs into product direction, designing the systems behind the experience, and personally writing and shipping production-quality code across the stack.

You will own the technical direction and end-to-end delivery of products spanning ChatGPT Work surfaces, backend services, plugins, connectors, enterprise data, permissions, and evaluations. You will make foundational architecture and product tradeoffs; establish patterns other engineers can build on; and hold these experiences to a high bar for reliability, security, observability, and customer value.

This is an individual-contributor role for an engineer who leads through technical judgment, direct execution, and influence-not people management. You should be equally comfortable working directly with customers, setting direction with senior cross-functional and platform partners, debugging complex production behavior, and staying close to the code. Success means taking a meaningful enterprise product from first principles through adoption at scale.
Responsibilities:
  • Set the technical direction for role-specific enterprise AI experiences, and personally design, build, and ship their most critical components across ChatGPT Work surfaces, services, plugins, and connectors.
  • Turn ambiguous customer and design-partner needs into a clear, generalizable product and technical strategy, with explicit milestones, architectural decisions, and measurable quality and adoption goals.
  • Lead complex initiatives across Design, Research, GTM, Security, and platform teams; align senior stakeholders; make consequential tradeoffs; and drive decisions through to implementation.
  • Architect production-grade systems and establish the evaluation, instrumentation, security, reliability, staged-rollout, and rollback standards required to operate probabilistic AI experiences safely.
  • Own the complete product and engineering lifecycle: problem definition, technical design, hands-on prototyping, production implementation, launch, customer feedback, and sustained iteration.
  • Define durable technical contracts and fallback strategies across connectors, identity, permissions, enterprise data, model routing, and shared platform dependencies; raise the engineering bar through architecture reviews, mentorship, and reusable patterns.
You might thrive in this role if:
  • You are a deeply experienced, hands-on product engineer-typically with 10+ years building production software-who combines exceptional technical depth with strong product judgment.
  • You can independently architect and implement sophisticated systems across frontend, backend, APIs, data, distributed services, and complex enterprise integrations.
  • You can earn trust with customers, influence senior stakeholders, and bring cross-functional teams to a clear decision without relying on formal authority.
  • You know how to turn uncertainty into a disciplined execution plan, using experiments, evaluations, instrumentation, and customer evidence to decide what to build.
  • You treat enterprise identity, permissions, privacy, security, performance, reliability, and operational readiness as foundational product requirements.
  • You have repeatedly led the architecture and hands-on delivery of important user-facing products from ambiguous beginnings through production use, and can explain the technical and product decisions that made them succeed.
  • You know when to build quickly, when to invest in foundational systems, and how to turn a specific customer workflow into a durable product that serves many customers.
Preferred qualifications
  • Extensive experience personally building and operating full-stack production products, including modern frontend technologies such as React and TypeScript and backend services in Python, Go, Node.js, or comparable languages.
  • A track record of setting technical direction for complex, integration-heavy or distributed systems, with deep understanding of APIs, data models, enterprise identity, authorization, secure data flows, and partial-failure behavior.
  • Demonstrated ownership of business-critical production systems at scale, including architecture, performance, observability, testing, incident response, migrations, staged delivery, and operational excellence.
  • Experience shipping applied AI, agentic, or conversational products, with a practical understanding of model behavior, tool use, grounding, evaluations, human feedback, and the reliability challenges of probabilistic systems.
  • Experience designing and building sophisticated workflow, data, analytics, visualization, or insight products that make complex systems genuinely useful to enterprise users.
  • A strong record of leading through technical judgment, mentoring experienced engineers, shaping cross-team architecture, and connecting engineering decisions to measurable customer outcomes and sustained adoption.

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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