Senior Software Engineer - Research Platform, Consumer Devices

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 293,000 - 325,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI in San Francisco, CA is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to build tools and platforms that accelerate AI research, evaluation, and data generation workflows. You will translate ambitious research questions into reliable systems, collaborating with ML researchers, designers, and engineers.

This role features a hybrid schedule (three days in the office per week) and relocation assistance for new hires.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Ownership of complex systems spanning multiple services or repositories.
• Expertise in generative AI, multimodal models, or model-evaluation systems.
• Built effective internal tools for both technical and non-technical users.
• Comfortable debugging distributed workflows and production infrastructure.
• Strong product judgment and ability to translate ambiguous requirements into concrete plans.
• Experience working between designers and researchers in a multidisciplinary team.

Responsibilities

• Build web applications, APIs, data models, and backend services for AI research workflows.
• Build tools to author and manage evaluation tasks, rubrics, graders, suites, and rollout configurations, including workflows for publishing, versioning, auditing, and sharing research artifacts.
• Automate evaluation runs and generate useful reports for design, research, and engineering teams.
• Support synthetic data generation workflows for multimodal and conversational research, including tools that combine transcripts, media, and model comparisons.
• Translate product and research questions into measurable scenarios, automated graders, and human-evaluation campaigns, and develop measures of task quality, coverage, diversity, and semantic spread.
• Diagnose issues across application code, workers, model endpoints, deployments, and compute infrastructure, and improve reliability through health checks, observability, reproducible launch paths, data integrity safeguards, and automated verification.
• Lead migrations and dependent changes across research tools, evaluation systems, and supporting services.
• Partner closely with designers, model researchers, research engineers, and infrastructure teams, and onboard contributors to create high-quality evaluation and synthetic-data workflows.

Skills

Full-stack development

Web applications

Backend services

APIs

Data models

Generative AI

Multimodal models

Internal tools

Distributed systems debugging

Observability

Collaboration

Job description

Overview

Senior Software Engineer - Research Platform, Consumer Devices – OpenAI, San Francisco, CA. Hybrid work model (three days in the office per week).

About the Team

The Future of Computing Research team is an Applied Research group within the Consumer Devices division. We focus on developing new methods and models to advance our mission of building AGI that benefits all of humanity. You will collaborate with ML researchers and design talent to push the frontier of model capabilities.

About the Role

We are looking for a Software Engineer to build tools and services that enable AI research, evaluation, and data generation workflows. You will translate ambiguous designs into working research systems, working with researchers, designers, and engineers to build evaluation systems, synthetic data generation pipelines, review tools, and supporting platform services. The goal is to make workflows easier to create, run, and trust, with reproducible results and observable systems that are reliable and reusable.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

You will

• Build web applications, APIs, data models, and backend services for AI research workflows.
• Build tools to author and manage evaluation tasks, rubrics, graders, suites, and rollout configurations, including workflows for publishing, versioning, auditing, and sharing research artifacts.
• Automate evaluation runs and generate useful reports for design, research, and engineering teams.
• Support synthetic data generation workflows for multimodal and conversational research, including tools that combine transcripts, media, and model comparisons.
• Translate product and research questions into measurable scenarios, automated graders, and human-evaluation campaigns, and develop measures of task quality, coverage, diversity, and semantic spread.
• Diagnose issues across application code, workers, model endpoints, deployments, and compute infrastructure, and improve reliability through health checks, observability, reproducible launch paths, data integrity safeguards, and automated verification.
• Lead migrations and dependent changes across research tools, evaluation systems, and supporting services.
• Partner closely with designers, model researchers, research engineers, and infrastructure teams, and onboard contributors to create high-quality evaluation and synthetic-data workflows.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 7+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Have strong full-stack experience across web applications, backend services, APIs, and data models, including ownership of complex systems spanning multiple services or repositories.
• Have expertise in generative AI, multimodal models, or model-evaluation systems.
• Have built effective internal tools for both technical and non-technical users.
• Are comfortable debugging distributed workflows and production infrastructure.
• Have strong product judgment and can translate ambiguous requirements into concrete plans.
• Are energized by working between designers and researchers in a multidisciplinary team, connecting qualitative judgment to rigorous evidence.
• Communicate clearly and work effectively across engineering, design, and research.

Nice to have

• Expertise in synthetic data generation, simulation, conversational AI, speech, video, motion, or embodied interaction.
• Experience with automated graders, human evaluation, supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, or experiment- and dataset-management platforms.
• Operated GPU-backed inference or rollout workloads at very large scale.

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 AI capabilities and seek to safely deploy them through our products. We value diverse perspectives and experiences.

We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other legally protected characteristics.

For more information, see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be conducted in accordance with applicable law. Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered as permitted by law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and related laws.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

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

Compensation

$293K – $325K + equity