Principal Software Engineer (AI)

Location: San Francisco, United States; hybrid work model with 3 days in the office per week. Relocation assistance is available to new employees.

Salary: $459K–$536K annual base pay, plus equity, eligible performance bonuses, and benefits.

Company

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

What you will do

• Set technical direction and lead complex initiatives across the Plugin Ecosystem.
• Design and ship APIs, SDKs, and services that extend ChatGPT and Codex.
• Improve plugin creation, discovery, installation, publishing, sharing, reliability, and interaction quality.
• Improve how models select and use plugins, working with Research to diagnose failures and measure quality.
• Build permissions, approvals, admin controls, and safe execution infrastructure for individuals and organizations.
• Collaborate with Engineering, Product, Design, Research, Security, and Trust & Safety while mentoring engineers and raising the engineering bar.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience building and shipping products or platforms relied on by people and developers.
• Experience leading complex technical initiatives across teams and driving product and design decisions with product managers and designers.
• Strong product quality judgment and the ability to make complex capabilities intuitive.
• Strong opinions about APIs and abstractions, with the ability to explain technical tradeoffs.
• Experience talking with users and developers and turning recurring problems into product and platform improvements.
• Ability to move between product questions and technical details, collaborate across teams, and take ambiguous problems through production.
• Comfort working across web interfaces and backend systems.
• Experience building products or software used by others, such as APIs, SDKs, open-source projects, developer platforms, or internal tools with real users.

Nice to have

• Experience with identity, permissions, or integration-heavy systems.
• Experience building applied AI systems, diagnosing model–tool interactions, and measuring reliability and quality.

Culture & Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer HSA contributions.
• 401(k) plan with employer match, paid parental, medical, caregiver, sick, and safe leave.
• Flexible PTO for exempt employees, paid holidays, and coordinated company office closures.
• Mental health and wellness support, life and disability coverage, and an annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily office meals, eligible meal delivery credits, relocation support, and additional taxable fringe benefits.

Hiring process

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