Senior Software Engineer – Research Platform, Consumer Devices

OpenAI

Software Engineer building web applications and APIs for AI research at OpenAI. Collaborating with researchers and designers to improve evaluation systems and workflows.

Posted 6/26/2026full-timeSan Francisco • California • 🇺🇸 United StatesSenior💰 $293,000 - $325,000 per yearWebsite

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Build web applications, APIs, data models, and backend services for AI research workflows.
Build tools to author and manage evaluation tasks, rubrics, graders, suites, and rollout configurations, including workflows for publishing, versioning, auditing, and sharing research artifacts.
Automate evaluation runs and generate useful reports for design, research, and engineering teams.
Support synthetic data generation workflows for multimodal and conversational research, including tools that combine transcripts, media, and model comparisons.
Translate product and research questions into measurable scenarios, automated graders, and human-evaluation campaigns, and develop measures of task quality, coverage, diversity, and semantic spread.
Diagnose issues across application code, workers, model endpoints, deployments, and compute infrastructure, and improve reliability through health checks, observability, reproducible launch paths, data integrity safeguards, and automated verification.
Lead migrations and dependent changes across research tools, evaluation systems, and supporting services.
Partner closely with designers, model researchers, research engineers, and infrastructure teams, and onboard contributors to create high-quality evaluation and synthetic-data workflows.

Requirements

What you’ll need

Have 7+ years of professional software engineering experience.
Have strong full-stack experience across web applications, backend services, APIs, and data models, including ownership of complex systems spanning multiple services or repositories.
Have expertise in generative AI, multimodal models, or model-evaluation systems.
Have built effective internal tools for both technical and non-technical users.
Are comfortable debugging distributed workflows and production infrastructure.
Have strong product judgment and can translate ambiguous requirements into concrete plans.
Are energized by working between designers and researchers in a multidisciplinary team, connecting qualitative judgment to rigorous evidence.
Communicate clearly and work effectively across engineering, design, and research.
Nice to have: Expertise in synthetic data generation, simulation, conversational AI, speech, video, motion, or embodied interaction.
Experience with automated graders, human evaluation, supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, or experiment- and dataset-management platforms.
Operated GPU-backed inference or rollout workloads at very large scale.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
401(k) retirement plan with employer match
Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
Mental health and wellness support
Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
Relocation support for eligible employees
Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

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Hard Skills & Tools

web applicationsAPIsdata modelsbackend servicesgenerative AImultimodal modelsmodel-evaluation systemsautomated gradersreinforcement learningGPU-backed inference

Soft Skills

product judgmentcommunicationcollaborationdebuggingtranslating requirementsworking in multidisciplinary teamsconnecting qualitative judgment to evidenceproblem-solvingleadershiponboarding contributors