OpenAI

Software Engineer, API Safety

OpenAI • $150K — $180K *
San Francisco, CA 94112In-Person
Information Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Today
Be an Early Applicant
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 7+ years in backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering roles.
  • Experience designing and operating production backend services or distributed systems.
  • Proficient in backend languages like Python, Go, Rust, or TypeScript.
  • Solid grasp of software engineering principles and system design.
  • Ability to translate complex capabilities into user-friendly APIs.
  • Strong communication skills for collaboration across teams.
  • Familiarity with observability and risk management systems is a plus.

Responsibilities

  • Design and build safety control dashboards and customer observability APIs.
  • Develop scalable systems for safety capabilities in various environments.
  • Collaborate with safety research teams to implement risk mitigation solutions.
  • Ensure high availability and performance of safeguards under heavy API traffic.
  • Lead projects from design through deployment, enhancing engineering standards.

Benefits

  • Opportunities to work on pioneering projects in AI deployment.
  • Collaborative work environment with cross-functional teams.
  • Professional growth in handling complex technical challenges.
  • Contributions to safety and risk management in AI development.
Full Job Description
About the Role

We're looking for product-minded software engineers to join a team that is addressing emerging risks at the frontier of model development while building novel solutions for real-world AI deployment. The day-to-day work ranges from solving production challenges to designing new product experiences and safeguards. The right candidate is comfortable balancing tradeoffs across developer experience, latency, reliability, and risk.

In this role, you will:
  • Design and build dashboards and APIs for safety controls and customer-facing observability.
  • Develop scalable systems that extend trusted safety capabilities to new use cases, customers, and deployment environments.
  • Partner with Safety Research and Integrity to build safeguards that mitigate emerging risks.
  • Be responsible for the availability, latency, and scalability of safeguards across high-volume API traffic.
  • Own projects from technical design and implementation through launch and ongoing iteration, while raising the team's engineering standards

Your background might look something like:
  • 7+ years of professional experience, excluding internships, in backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering roles.
  • A track record of designing, building, and operating production backend services, developer-facing APIs, or distributed systems.
  • Strong software engineering and systems fundamentals, with experience leading technically complex projects from ambiguous ideas to production.
  • Proficiency in one or more general-purpose backend languages, such as Python, Go, Rust, or TypeScript.
  • Experience building reliable, scalable systems and reasoning about distributed architecture, concurrency, latency, observability, and operational tradeoffs.
  • Product judgment and developer empathy, including an ability to turn complex model or infrastructure capabilities into clear, intuitive APIs.
  • Clear communication and a collaborative approach to working with researchers, product managers, designers, infrastructure engineers, and customers.
  • Experience with observability, abuse prevention, trust and safety, identity, security, privacy, compliance, or risk systems is a strong plus.
  • Interest in helping frontier AI reach more developers and businesses responsibly.


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
Information Technology
Founded
2015
* Ladders Estimates

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