Software Engineer, API Safety

About the Team

OpenAIs mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. The API Platform turns frontier research into reliable capabilities that developers use to build transformative products and services for people around the world.

API Safetys goal is to ensure safe deployment of frontier models in the API. We design APIs and systems that help developers share usage context understand safety events and apply safeguards tailored to the risk profile of the applications they are building. This work is critical to our frontier model launches and partners closely with teams across API Integrity and Safety Research.

About the Role

Were 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 teams 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 AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core and to achieve our mission we must encompass and value the many different perspectives voices and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer and we do not discriminate on the basis of race religion color national origin sex sexual orientation age veteran status disability genetic information or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information please see OpenAIs Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary confidential and non-public addition job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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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.

Required Experience:

IC