Senior Backend Engineer, AI Agent Platform

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking an experienced backend software engineer to design and operate the core agent harness and infrastructure powering long-running workflows across OpenAI and partner products. You will advance reliable systems, enable safe execution, and collaborate with research, Codex, and product teams to translate evolving model capabilities into production-ready primitives.

This role demands strong backend fundamentals, ownership, and the ability to balance speed with reliability in a

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional engineering experience in backend, infrastructure, platform, or product-driven roles.
• Exceptional backend engineering fundamentals and track record of leading complex systems to production.
• Proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript, or similar.
• Strong systems design and operational judgment across distributed systems, APIs, workflow orchestration, search or storage, compute and execution, identity and permissions, or observability and reliability.
• Infrastructure depth paired with product judgment: you can abstract complex systems into simple, durable primitives.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the shared agent harness and backend infrastructure that power long-running, high-value workflows across OpenAI and third-party products.
• Build reusable capabilities across search and connected context, computer use, memory, tool execution, delegation, subagents, and multi-agent orchestration.
• Establish the foundations agents need to operate safely in production, including secure execution environments, identity and permissions, observability, evaluations, reliability, and cost and latency efficiency.
• Partner with Research, Codex, infrastructure, applied product teams, and external developers to translate model progress, traces, evaluations, and real workflow needs into shared capabilities and measurable gains in task completion, cost, and latency.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Python

Go

Rust

TypeScript

Job description

OpenAI is seeking an experienced backend software engineer to design and operate the core agent harness and infrastructure powering long-running workflows across OpenAI and partner products. You will advance reliable systems, enable safe execution, and collaborate with research, Codex, and product teams to translate evolving model capabilities into production-ready primitives.

This role demands strong backend fundamentals, ownership, and the ability to balance speed with reliability in a