Principal AI Software Architect & Systems Leader

ResumeXrays LLC; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 260,000 - 360,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to define and build the next generation of AI-powered software development workflows. This role extends beyond traditional full stack, shaping architecture, developer tooling, and cloud infrastructure.

You will lead major product initiatives, translate vision into scalable strategies, and guide a team of engineers and partners. You'll remain hands-on while elevating technical judgment and execution across the group.

Qualifications

• Experience leading technically complex projects with impact beyond a single feature or team.
• Ability translate evolving product vision into scalable architectures and actionable engineering strategy.
• Strong track record in balancing speed, quality and long-term leverage in large projects.

Responsibilities

• Set technical and product direction for significant areas of Codex, translating product vision into scalable architectures and an actionable engineering strategy.
• Lead multi-quarter initiatives across client apps, backend services, agent systems, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling.
• Design AI-powered workflows that generalize across languages, codebases, environments, and orgs while remaining intuitive and safe.
• Make high-consequence architectural decisions under ambiguity, balancing rapid learning with system quality.
• Identify cross-team opportunities and align stakeholders around a direction from exploration to launch.
• Collaborate with product, design, research, infra, security, and GTM to turn model capabilities into coherent experiences.
• Engage with developers and open-source communities to uncover needs and differentiate foundational work from incremental improvements.
• Establish patterns for reliability, observability, performance, experimentation, and evaluation in AI-powered workflows.
• Serve as a technical multiplier by mentoring engineers and improving engineering practices.
• Contribute directly to implementation in novel, technically demanding areas.

Skills

Technical leadership

Architectural design

AI/ML workflows

Cloud & infra

Tools

Frontend tooling

Backend services

Dev tooling

Job description

OpenAI is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to define and build the next generation of AI-powered software development workflows. This role extends beyond traditional full stack, shaping architecture, developer tooling, and cloud infrastructure.

You will lead major product initiatives, translate vision into scalable strategies, and guide a team of engineers and partners. You'll remain hands-on while elevating technical judgment and execution across the group.