OpenAI

Software Engineer, Core Science

OpenAI$293K — $385K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of experience in backend or full-stack engineering
  • Proven ability to take complex product ideas from prototype to production with a focus on performance
  • Experience in highly ambiguous environments with rapidly evolving needs
  • Familiarity with building scalable distributed systems and data-intensive applications
  • Strong communication skills to collaborate across diverse teams and domains
  • Interest in scientific disciplines and workflows, such as computational biology and biomedical research
  • Commitment to product quality and user feedback for continuous improvement

Responsibilities

  • Shape AI-powered scientific research by developing backend systems and full-stack product experiences
  • Create AI-native workflows for literature review, research synthesis, and scientific knowledge exploration
  • Collaborate with researchers to identify opportunities for AI in scientific workflows
  • Build tools for data analysis and computational experiments to assist researchers
  • Establish robust foundations for fast-moving projects while balancing speed with quality

Benefits

  • Hybrid work model with 3 days in office per week
  • Relocation assistance for new employees
Full Job Description
About the Role

As a Software Engineer, Core Sciences, you will help design and build the platforms, products, and infrastructure powering AI-native scientific research workflows inside Codex.

We're looking for people who are excited about building ambitious 01 systems at the intersection of AI, engineering, and scientific discovery. This role spans both backend and full-stack engineering, with opportunities to work closely with researchers, applied scientists, and product teams to define entirely new experiences for scientific exploration and experimentation.

This role owns systems end-to-end: from architecture and implementation to evaluation, launch, and production operations, with a strong bias for both quality and velocity. You will build across backend services, data and orchestration pipelines, model-powered workflows, and user-facing experiences, making thoughtful trade-offs as scientific use cases and AI capabilities rapidly evolve. Success in this role means turning ambitious, ambiguous ideas into reliable products that researchers can use to analyze data, run simulations, explore evidence, and accelerate scientific discovery.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:
  • Shape the future of AI-powered scientific research by building backend systems and full-stack product experiences across Prism and Codex
  • Develop AI-native workflows for paper writing, literature review, paper understanding, research synthesis, and scientific knowledge exploration, designing systems that can work across complex technical content, heterogeneous sources, and evolving research questions.
  • Partner closely with researchers and domain experts across biology and adjacent scientific disciplines to understand real research workflows, identify high-leverage opportunities for AI, and translate ambiguous scientific needs into useful, trustworthy product capabilities.
  • Build AI-powered tools for scientific data analysis and simulation, helping researchers explore complex datasets, design and run computational experiments, interpret results, and iterate on models or hypotheses more efficiently.
  • Help establish the product, platform, and engineering foundations for fast-moving 0  1 efforts across the Core Science organization, balancing rapid experimentation with the rigor, reliability, and quality required for tools used in research.


You might thrive in this role if you:
  • Have strong backend or full-stack engineering fundamentals and experience taking complex product ideas from prototype to reliable production systems, with attention to performance, usability, and maintainability.
  • Are comfortable building in highly ambiguous 0  1 environments, where customer needs, product direction, technical architecture, and model capabilities are evolving quickly.
  • Are excited about applying AI systems to consequential real-world scientific problems, and care about building tools that improve how researchers reason, analyze evidence, collaborate, and make discoveries.
  • Have experience building scalable distributed systems, developer platforms, data-intensive applications, retrieval or knowledge systems, workflow tools, or model-powered product experiences.
  • Care deeply about product quality, iteration speed, and user impact, and can use feedback from researchers and domain experts to rapidly improve systems while maintaining scientific and technical trustworthiness.
  • Are curious about scientific workflows and domains such as computational biology, biology, chemistry, biomedical research, scientific literature, or research tooling, and are motivated to learn from experts in these areas.
  • Communicate clearly across engineering, research, product, and domain-specialist audiences, and enjoy turning complex, underspecified problems into opinionated systems that researchers can depend on.

Compensation Range: $293K - $385K USD

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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