Backend Engineer

About the Team
The Backend Engineering team is responsible for designing and scaling the systems that power OpenAI's products, from early concepts through production scale. We focus on building performant, secure, and resilient infrastructure that supports evolving product needs while enabling long-term growth. Our work spans services, APIs, and infrastructure, and we collaborate closely with product, full-stack, and cross-functional partners to ensure cohesive end-to-end solutions.

About the Role
OpenAI is hiring a Backend Engineer to design and build scalable, performant, and secure systems that underpin our products. You will work across APIs, services, and infrastructure, making thoughtful tradeoffs to deliver quickly while laying the foundation for long-term maintainability. Success in this role requires a deep understanding of backend systems, along with enough end-to-end context-from client/edge to cloud-to guide technical decisions that best serve both the product and the team.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. It is fully onsite, 5 days per week, and we offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Architect, build, and maintain high-performance, secure backend systems

• Design APIs, data models, and infrastructure to support evolving product needs

• Balance near-term velocity with long-term scalability and maintainability

• Collaborate with product, full-stack, and cross-functional teams to ensure cohesive end-to-end solutions

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a focus on backend systems

• Demonstrate a proven track record of building and scaling systems from early stage to production scale

• Are proficient in Python and Go, and familiar with a wide range of server-side technologies

• Have a strong grasp of system design, performance optimization, and security best practices

• Can reason about full-stack tradeoffs, from client/edge through cloud infrastructure

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience with distributed systems and cloud architectures

• Background in instrumentation, analytics, and performance tuning

• Familiarity with edge-to-cloud integrations or AI services

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 OpenAI's Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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 information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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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.

Compensation Range: $380K - $460K