Software Engineer, API Safety

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The API Platform turns frontier research into reliable capabilities that developers use to build transformative products and services. API Safety's goal is to ensure safe deployment of frontier models in the API, designing APIs and systems that help developers share usage context, understand safety events, and apply safeguards tailored to the risk profile of their applications. The team partners closely with teams across API, Integrity, and Safety Research.

We're looking for product-minded software engineers to join a team addressing emerging risks at the frontier of model development while building novel solutions for real-world AI deployment. The right candidate balances tradeoffs across developer experience, latency, reliability, and risk.

• Design and build dashboards and APIs for safety controls and customer-facing observability.
• Develop scalable systems that extend trusted safety capabilities to new use cases, customers, and deployment environments.
• Partner with Safety Research and Integrity to build safeguards that mitigate emerging risks.
• Be responsible for the availability, latency, and scalability of safeguards across high-volume API traffic.
• Own projects from technical design and implementation through launch and ongoing iteration, while raising the team's engineering standards.

• 7+ years of professional experience, excluding internships, in backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering roles.
• A track record of designing, building, and operating production backend services, developer-facing APIs, or distributed systems.
• Strong software engineering and systems fundamentals, with experience leading technically complex projects from ambiguous ideas to production.
• Proficiency in one or more general-purpose backend languages, such as Python, Go, Rust, or TypeScript.
• Experience building reliable, scalable systems and reasoning about distributed architecture, concurrency, latency, observability, and operational tradeoffs.
• Product judgment and developer empathy, including an ability to turn complex model or infrastructure capabilities into clear, intuitive APIs.
• Clear communication and a collaborative approach to working with researchers, product managers, designers, infrastructure engineers, and customers.
• Experience with observability, abuse prevention, trust and safety, identity, security, privacy, compliance, or risk systems is a strong plus.

Salary range: $293K – $385K USD, plus equity.