Strategic Overview
Full-Stack Software Engineer, Applied Foundations at OpenAI is a dev opportunity centered on the specialist responsibilities and outcomes described in the employer's listing.
The published role emphasizes work such as Architect, build, and improve frontend and backend systems. Work across the full stack to build products and systems from initial exploration through launch readiness.
The role is listed for San Francisco with hybrid working arrangement, giving candidates the practical context needed to assess fit before applying. Relevant signals in the listing include Applied AI, Applied AI Engineering.
Key information at a glance
About This Role
About the Team
OpenAI’s Applications Engineering organization builds and operates the products (such as ChatGPT & Codex) that bring our cutting-edge research to millions of users and developers worldwide.
The Applied Foundations team owns the core product and platform layers that make those experiences possible — from identity & access, to safety to payments & commerce across all of our apps. Our teams span product engineering, infrastructure, and safety, working together to deliver technology that is reliable, secure, and trusted at global scale.
Key Responsibilities & Objectives
- Architect, build, and improve frontend and backend systems.
- Work across the full stack to build products and systems from initial exploration through launch readiness.
- Participate in long-term architectural planning and technical design reviews.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design solutions that protect against and mitigate adversarial attacks without compromising user experience.
Salary & Benefits
Published compensation: $266K – $445K
Salary Benchmark
This role’s published compensation is compared with current employer-disclosed salary ranges for the same role in the same currency.
Benchmark uses active employer job postings in our database and excludes this listing. It is not a third-party salary estimate, and currencies are not converted.
Full Job Description
The following is the complete job description supplied by the source. We sanitize unsafe markup and remove external links, but do not shorten or rewrite the employer's source content.
About the Team
OpenAI’s Applications Engineering organization builds and operates the products (such as ChatGPT & Codex) that bring our cutting-edge research to millions of users and developers worldwide.
The Applied Foundations team owns the core product and platform layers that make those experiences possible — from identity & access, to safety to payments & commerce across all of our apps. Our teams span product engineering, infrastructure, and safety, working together to deliver technology that is reliable, secure, and trusted at global scale.
About the Role
We’re hiring Full-Stack Software Engineers to design and implement safe services, systems and infrastructure that power our core products.
In this role, you will:
Architect, build, and improve frontend and backend systems.
Work across the full stack to build products and systems from initial exploration through launch readiness.
Participate in long-term architectural planning and technical design reviews.
Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design solutions that protect against and mitigate adversarial attacks without compromising user experience.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have built and shipped full-stack apps or systems end-to-end — in fast-moving, startup-like environments.
Have a humble attitude, an eagerness to help your colleagues, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed.
Enjoy building resilient products and services that handle large scale and complexity.
Are self-directed and enjoy figuring out the best way to solve a particular problem
Own problems end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done.
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 Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity 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.
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.
OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy
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.
Editor’s Market Perspective (Our Custom Analysis)
Why This Position Matters
This dev opening is a useful opportunity for candidates whose experience matches Applied AI, Applied AI Engineering. Its strongest career signal is the scope of the work itself — particularly Architect, build, and improve frontend and backend systems. — rather than a generic title alone.
Resume & Application Strategy
For the application, mirror the employer's language where it truthfully matches your background: foreground Applied AI, Applied AI Engineering, quantify outcomes from comparable work, and place the most relevant experience near the top of the resume. If the listing specifies tools, platforms, leadership scope, or domain experience, use those exact terms in context instead of presenting an unrelated keyword list.
We organize source-provided information into this independent job-seeker overview. Compensation is shown only when the source provides it; the official listing remains the authority for current requirements and application instructions.