Backend Engineer, Agent Orchestration & Systems

Slope; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 220,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI in San Francisco seeks an experienced backend engineer to design and operate the core systems behind the next generation of agents. You will build reliable services to help agents find context, use tools, coordinate workflows, and execute actions safely.

You will work across runtimes, orchestration, search, observability, and tools, partnering with Research, Codex, infrastructure, and product teams to translate advances into production primitives.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of engineering experience in backend/infra roles.
• Strong fundamentals and track record building reliable production services.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, Rust or TypeScript.
• Strong systems design across APIs, orchestration, and observability.
• Ability to turn research capabilities into dependable production primitives.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the shared agent harness and backend infrastructure powering long-running workflows.
• Build reusable capabilities across search, context, memory, tool execution, delegation, subagents, and multi-agent orchestration.
• Establish secure execution environments, identity and permissions, observability, reliability, and cost/latency efficiency.
• Partner with Research, Codex, infrastructure, and product teams to translate model progress and traces into shared capabilities.

Skills

7+ years exp

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

APIs

Python

Go

Rust

TypeScript

Observability

Job description

OpenAI in San Francisco seeks an experienced backend engineer to design and operate the core systems behind the next generation of agents. You will build reliable services to help agents find context, use tools, coordinate workflows, and execute actions safely.

You will work across runtimes, orchestration, search, observability, and tools, partnering with Research, Codex, infrastructure, and product teams to translate advances into production primitives.