Principal Software Engineer (AI)

Location: San Francisco, United States; relocation support is available for eligible employees.

Salary: $459,000–$536,000 per year base pay, plus equity and potentially performance-related bonuses.

Company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company building and safely deploying general-purpose artificial intelligence products.

What you will do

• Set technical and product direction for significant areas of Codex and translate product vision into scalable architectures and engineering strategy.
• Lead multi-quarter initiatives across client applications, backend services, agent systems, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling.
• Design AI-powered workflows that generalize across programming languages, codebases, development environments, and organizations.
• Make architectural decisions balancing product learning, system quality, adaptability, reliability, performance, safety, and experimentation.
• Partner with product, design, research, infrastructure, security, and go-to-market teams, as well as developers, open-source maintainers, startups, and enterprises.
• Review critical designs, mentor engineers, improve engineering practices, and contribute directly to technically demanding implementation.

Requirements

• Experience leading the design and delivery of technically complex, user-facing systems with impact beyond a single feature or team.
• Deep software-engineering expertise across product interfaces, distributed systems, infrastructure, and developer tooling, combined with strong product judgment.
• Experience creating clarity in ambiguous problem spaces, setting technical direction, and aligning multiple teams or disciplines.
• Ability to remain hands-on while increasing engineering effectiveness through architecture, mentorship, decision-making, and technical leadership.
• Deep understanding of modern software-development workflows and how AI agents require new interaction and system designs.
• Experience building or operating AI-powered products, including understanding of nondeterminism, evaluation, latency, reliability, safety, and rapidly evolving model capabilities.
• Ability to make thoughtful tradeoffs between speed, product learning, technical quality, and long-term leverage.
• Ability to develop perspectives from user evidence, revise them as technology and user behavior evolve, and communicate clearly with engineering, product, design, research, and executive audiences.

Culture & Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match, flexible or accrued paid time off, paid holidays, sick and safe time, and paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Mental health and wellness support, employer-paid basic life and disability coverage, and commuter or meal benefits.
• Annual learning and development stipend, charitable donation matching, and wellness stipends may be available.
• Work includes a strong focus on AI safety, human needs, diverse perspectives, and equal employment opportunity.

Hiring process

• More detailed benefits information is provided during the hiring process.
• Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law.