OpenAI
Software Engineer, API Agents
San Francisco · Senior · Contract
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 7 days ago
TypeScriptPythonGoRustDistributed SystemsAI OrchestrationSystems EngineeringResearchCommunication
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About the role
- The role combines deep backend and infrastructure work with strong product judgment, with opportunities to work across agent runtimes, orchestration, search, execution environments, identity and permissions, observability, and evaluations.
- This is software and systems engineering rather than model training: success comes from strong backend fundamentals, high agency, and the ability to turn fast-moving research capabilities into dependable production primitives.
- We carry the capabilities behind Codex into a much broader set of products and workflows across software engineering, research, finance, healthcare, enterprise operations, and more.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Sitting at the intersection of Research, Codex, infrastructure, and applied product teams, we build reusable agent capabilities that compound across the ecosystem.
Requirements
- Proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript, or similar, with the ability to move comfortably across service, platform, and product boundaries.
Company info
- API Agents builds the shared agent harness, tools, and infrastructure that turn OpenAI's frontier models into systems that can reliably complete real work.
- Our work spans search and connected context, computer use, memory, delegation and multi-agent coordination, and safe execution.
- OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.
- We are looking for an experienced backend software engineer to build the core systems behind the next generation of agents.
Equal opportunity
- For additional information, please see OpenAI's Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.
This listing is sourced directly from OpenAI's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.