Software Engineer, Guardian (AI)

Location: London, UK; hybrid, based in the London office

Company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company building general-purpose AI systems with safety and human needs at their core.

What you will do

• Design, build, and operate core components of Auto-review and the Guardian platform, balancing safety, product utility, latency, and operational reliability.
• Build real-time production systems that evaluate agent actions, detect potentially harmful behavior, and support safe recovery or escalation.
• Improve oversight systems’ understanding of user intent, environmental context, permissions, and personalization signals while protecting privacy.
• Translate alignment research, prototypes, evaluations, and monitoring techniques into scalable product capabilities.
• Integrate Guardian capabilities into agent experiences with Product, Security, Infrastructure, and engineering teams across OpenAI.
• Develop evaluations, adversarial tests, and monitoring; own projects end to end and investigate failures to improve reliability.

Requirements

• Experience building and shipping complex production software with ownership across design, implementation, deployment, and operation.
• Experience building with AI agents or large language models in a core product, startup, or technically serious independent project, with an understanding of agentic-system challenges.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and the ability to design reliable backend services, APIs, and infrastructure.
• Sound product-engineering judgment when balancing safety, usability, speed, and reliability.
• Ability to work closely with researchers, translate open-ended ideas into practical systems, and use experiments and evaluations to guide decisions.
• Comfort with ambiguity, initiative, and clear communication across technical disciplines.
• Commitment to building AI systems that are useful, trustworthy, and safe.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work based in the London office within a concentrated, highly collaborative engineering group.
• Cross-functional collaboration across engineering, alignment research, product, infrastructure, and security.
• Equal opportunity employment and reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities.
• Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law.