Senior Backend Engineer, API Safety & Observability

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 293,000 - 385,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a product-minded software engineer to join the API Safety team, tackling frontier model risks while delivering new product experiences and safeguards. You will design and scale dashboards, APIs, and systems that balance latency, reliability, and safety for high-volume API traffic.

You will own projects from design through launch, collaborate with Safety Research, Integrity, and API teams, and raise engineering standards across the group.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional backend or platform engineering experience.
• Experience building production backend services and APIs.
• Proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Python, Go, Rust, or TypeScript.
• Experience with distributed systems, latency, observability, and operational tradeoffs.
• Ability to turn complex model or infrastructure capabilities into clear, intuitive APIs.
• Strong communication and collaboration with researchers, PMs, designers, engineers, and customers.
• Experience with safety, trust, identity, security, privacy, compliance, or risk systems is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

• Design and build dashboards and APIs for safety controls and observability.
• Develop scalable systems extending safety capabilities to new use cases and deployment environments.
• Partner with Safety Research and Integrity to build safeguards against emerging risks.
• Ensure availability, latency, and scalability of safeguards across high-volume API traffic.
• Own projects from design and implementation through launch and iteration, raising engineering standards.

Skills

Backend engineering

APIs

Distributed systems

Observability

Product judgment

Developer empathy

Communication

Job description

OpenAI is seeking a product-minded software engineer to join the API Safety team, tackling frontier model risks while delivering new product experiences and safeguards. You will design and scale dashboards, APIs, and systems that balance latency, reliability, and safety for high-volume API traffic.

You will own projects from design through launch, collaborate with Safety Research, Integrity, and API teams, and raise engineering standards across the group.