Software Engineer, Youth Well-Being

OpenAI; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading AI company in California is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect experiences for families and youth. This role focuses on building safety systems, ensuring age-appropriate interactions with AI technology, and navigating regulatory complexities. Candidates should have strong collaboration skills and a passion for digital safety. Join us to make a significant impact in youth well-being through technology.

Qualifications

• Experience building products or infrastructure for users under 18.
• Hands-on experience with identity platforms and user verification.
• Comfortable with complex problem-solving in cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities

• Architect and implement teen and guardian experiences across products.
• Build global age assurance systems that are privacy-preserving.
• Design and evolve identity infrastructure for scalable user journeys.

Skills

Experience with identity platforms

Interest in digital safety

Ability to navigate legal constraints

Strong collaboration skills

Knowledge of regulatory standards

Job description

The Youth Well-Being product team is part of the Integrity pillar at OpenAI, responsible for ensuring that our state-of-the-art AI technologies are deployed in safe, age-appropriate, and beneficial ways—especially for youth and families.

We work across OpenAI’s entire product surface area, from ChatGPT to future-facing tools, to architect safety and trust into the foundation of our systems. Our mission: empower families while meeting the highest standards of regulatory compliance and ethical responsibility.

This work is core to OpenAI’s mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity. Safety, especially for the most vulnerable users, is more important to us than unfettered growth.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help architect and build the foundational systems that power family- and youth-facing experiences at scale. You’ll help define how teens and guardians engage with OpenAI products—ensuring those experiences are safe, compliant, and empowering.

You’ll operate across a broad technical surface: building identity primitives, age assurance pipelines, and guardian tools that support both proactive and reactive interventions. You’ll collaborate closely with a cross-functional team of engineers, data scientists, designers, user researchers, and policy experts.

This is a high-impact, 0→1 opportunity to set the standard for how families interact with generative AI.

In this role, you will:

• Architect and implement teen and guardian experiences across OpenAI products, including ChatGPT.
• Build global age assurance systems that are privacy-preserving and tailored to regional compliance needs.
• Design and evolve our identity infrastructure to support scalable, secure, and resilient user journeys at consumer internet scale.
• Help define safety and well‑being metrics, and continuously improve user trust through technical interventions.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have built products or infrastructure for users under 18, or have a strong interest in digital safety, youth well‑being, or educational technology.
• Have hands‑on experience with identity platforms, auth/authz systems, or user verification at scale.
• Have worked on systems with regulatory complexity (e.g., COPPA, GDPR‑K, UK OSA, KOSA) or experience navigating legal constraints in product development.
• Are comfortable owning complex, ambiguous problems end‑to‑end, learning quick, and adapting to fast‑changing priorities, and can thrive in a cross‑functional team, with strong collaboration across policy, research, legal, and product functions.
• Care deeply about building systems that are not just performant, but also inclusive, thoughtful, and ethical.

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.

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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non‑compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

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

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.