Software Engineer, API Safety

AI Chopping Block; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking product-minded software engineers to join a team addressing emerging risks at the frontier of model development, while building novel solutions for real-world AI deployment. The role balances tradeoffs across developer experience, latency, reliability, and risk.

You will design and build dashboards and APIs for safety controls, develop scalable systems, and partner with Safety Research to mitigate evolving risks.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional backend/infra/platform or product engineering experience.
• Track record designing, building, operating production backend services or APIs.
• Strong fundamentals in software engineering and distributed systems, able to lead complex projects.

Responsibilities

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

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

APIs

Observability

DevOps

Communication

Python

Go

Rust

TypeScript

Job description

About the Team

OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. The API Platform turns frontier research into reliable capabilities that developers use to build transformative products and services for people around the world.

API Safety's goal is to ensure safe deployment of frontier models in the API. We design APIs and systems that help developers share usage context, understand safety events, and apply safeguards tailored to the risk profile of the applications they are building. This work is critical to our frontier model launches and partners closely with teams across API, Integrity, and Safety Research.

About the Role

We're looking for product-minded software engineers to join a team that is addressing emerging risks at the frontier of model development while building novel solutions for real-world AI deployment. The day-to-day work ranges from solving production challenges to designing new product experiences and safeguards. The right candidate is comfortable balancing tradeoffs across developer experience, latency, reliability, and risk.

In this role, you will:

• Design and build dashboards and APIs for safety controls and customer-facing observability.
• Develop scalable systems that extend trusted safety capabilities to new use cases, customers, and deployment environments.
• Partner with Safety Research and Integrity to build safeguards that mitigate emerging risks.
• Be responsible for the availability, latency, and scalability of safeguards across high-volume API traffic.
• Own projects from technical design and implementation through launch and ongoing iteration, while raising the team’s engineering standards

Your background might look something like:

• 7+ years of professional experience, excluding internships, in backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering roles.
• A track record of designing, building, and operating production backend services, developer-facing APIs, or distributed systems.
• Strong software engineering and systems fundamentals, with experience leading technically complex projects from ambiguous ideas to production.
• Proficiency in one or more general-purpose backend languages, such as Python, Go, Rust, or TypeScript.
• Experience building reliable, scalable systems and reasoning about distributed architecture, concurrency, latency, observability, and operational tradeoffs.
• Product judgment and developer empathy, including an ability to turn complex model or infrastructure capabilities into clear, intuitive APIs.
• Clear communication and a collaborative approach to working with researchers, product managers, designers, infrastructure engineers, and customers.
• Experience with observability, abuse prevention, trust and safety, identity, security, privacy, compliance, or risk systems is a strong plus.
• Interest in helping frontier AI reach more developers and businesses responsibly.

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 the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

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

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affi…Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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