Strategic Overview
Software Engineer, Full Stack (People Innovation Labs) at OpenAI is defined by the responsibilities and candidate requirements in the employer's listing.
The published role emphasizes work such as Own the full product development lifecycle for new people products end-to-end, building highly autonomously in collaboration with product managers, designers, data scientists, recruiters, HR business partners, and operations experts.
The role is listed for United States with a hybrid working arrangement, giving candidates the practical context needed to assess fit before applying.
Key information at a glance
About This Role
People Innovation Labs is a fast-moving, customer-obsessed engineering, product, and design team embedded in the People organization, focused on rethinking how we find and retain the best talent and empower everyone to do their best work.
About the Role
We are looking for a product engineer who loves shipping in an iterative, fast-moving, and richly cross-functional environment. This team is for entrepreneurial full-stack builders who are deeply curious about culture, recruiting, and people development and want to consider everything from the business strategy and metrics down to the code and agent implementations that gets us there.
Key Responsibilities & Objectives
- Own the full product development lifecycle for new people products end-to-end, building highly autonomously in collaboration with product managers, designers, data scientists, recruiters, HR business partners, and operations experts
- Develop deep relationships with internal stakeholders to understand their problems and push for innovative solutions to address them
- Work with research and product teams to share relevant feedback and iterate on applying the latest models
- Operate and grow our internal product portfolio with a high degree of product quality, security/privacy/reliability, and responsiveness to user feedback
- 5+ years of professional engineering experience (excluding internships) in relevant roles at tech and product-driven companies
- Former founder, or early engineer at a startup who built a product from scratch is a plus
- Interest in building company culture and/or recruiting and developing the world’s most talented people
- Proficiency with web technologies (we use Python, JavaScript, PostgreSQL) and modern agentic coding tools
- Interest in keeping up with the state of the art in LLMs and applying it thoughtfully and safely within a complex problem domain
- Ability to move quickly in an ambiguous environment with loosely defined tasks and competing priorities or deadlines
Required Qualifications & Candidate Blueprint
- Operate and grow our internal product portfolio with a high degree of product quality, security/privacy/reliability, and responsiveness to user feedback
- Ability to move quickly in an ambiguous environment with loosely defined tasks and competing priorities or deadlines
Salary & Benefits
Published compensation: $153K – $385K
Salary Benchmark
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Benchmark uses active employer job postings in our database, excludes this listing, and matches the currency and pay period. It is not a third-party salary estimate; 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
People Innovation Labs is a fast-moving, customer-obsessed engineering, product, and design team embedded in the People organization, focused on rethinking how we find and retain the best talent and empower everyone to do their best work. Across recruiting, HR, and internal communications and culture, we’re shipping systems and agents that give employees and our People team a significant edge by infusing OpenAI’s technology into every aspect of our work. Our portfolio spans internal products like OpenHouse (our internal knowledge hub and workflow platform) and a custom recruiting software stack. We’re harnessing OpenAI’s latest models and platforms to simultaneously rapidly scale the organization and redefine the future of work, creating a blueprint for how AI can supercharge productivity, culture, and innovation.
About the Role
We are looking for a product engineer who loves shipping in an iterative, fast-moving, and richly cross-functional environment. This team is for entrepreneurial full-stack builders who are deeply curious about culture, recruiting, and people development and want to consider everything from the business strategy and metrics down to the code and agent implementations that gets us there. In this role, you will work with domain experts on the People team and leaders across the company to build software and agents focused on HR, culture and recruiting from the ground up. You’ll also innovate on how we apply OpenAI’s latest LLMs and developer platforms in these domains, maintaining a continuous feedback loop with research and product teams.
In this role, you will:
Own the full product development lifecycle for new people products end-to-end, building highly autonomously in collaboration with product managers, designers, data scientists, recruiters, HR business partners, and operations experts
Develop deep relationships with internal stakeholders to understand their problems and push for innovative solutions to address them
Work with research and product teams to share relevant feedback and iterate on applying the latest models
Operate and grow our internal product portfolio with a high degree of product quality, security/privacy/reliability, and responsiveness to user feedback
Your background might look something like:
5+ years of professional engineering experience (excluding internships) in relevant roles at tech and product-driven companies
Former founder, or early engineer at a startup who built a product from scratch is a plus
Interest in building company culture and/or recruiting and developing the world’s most talented people
Proficiency with web technologies (we use Python, JavaScript, PostgreSQL) and modern agentic coding tools
Interest in keeping up with the state of the art in LLMs and applying it thoughtfully and safely within a complex problem domain
Ability to move quickly in an ambiguous environment with loosely defined tasks and competing priorities or deadlines
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 opening may suit candidates who can demonstrate experience relevant to the employer's published requirements. Its strongest career signal is the scope of the work itself — particularly Own the full product development lifecycle for new people products end-to-end, building highly autonomously in collaboration with product managers, designers, data scientists, recruiters, HR business partners, and operations experts — rather than a generic title alone.
Resume & Application Strategy
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