Backend Engineer, OpenAI
Core Data Systems
AI research and development platform
Job no longer available
AI research and development platform
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
1001+ employees
Company mission
To ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
Role
Who you are
- Have meaningful experience with building (and rebuilding) production systems to deliver new product capabilities and to handle increasing scale
- Care deeply about the end user experience and take pride in building products to solve customer needs
- Have a humble attitude, an eagerness to help your colleagues, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed
- Own problems end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done
- Build tools to accelerate your own (and your teammates’) workflows, but only when off-the-shelf solutions won’t do
- Are interested in and thoughtful about the impacts of AI technology (see our Charter for examples of our goals) and care deeply about the impact of ML models on people's lives; how to maximize the benefits and mitigate the possible harms
What the job involves
- Architect, build, and deploy the data infra and back-end systems and services that power our data generation and management platform
- Collaborate closely with product managers, researchers, and the rest of our engineering team to create new products around emerging research capabilities and unsolved customer needs
- Iterate rapidly to improve user and developer experience while advancing scalability, performance, observability, and security
Salary benchmarks
Our take
OpenAI aims to research and deploy AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) that is safe, controllable and beneficial to all of humanity. The company began its mission by developing an API that can solve language-based tasks, such as answering written questions or pulling up relevant documents based on a query.
Following the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, which gained more than 1 million users in its first 5 days and is already worth billions, OpenAI announced a paid version named ChatGPT Plus which will be launched in the US first.
It is worth noting that OpenAI is not without controversy. Its products have sparked conversations regarding the morals and implications of AI tools, and recent investigations have uncovered misalignments between the company's public commitments and its alleged operations behind closed doors.
Whilst AI applications can be found in a vast variety of tech startups, this generally consists of the automation of algorithmic tasks such as data analysis and organization. OpenAI’s approach to designing true human-like artificial intelligence is futuristic, but with support from its high-profile partners (such as Microsoft), an annualised revenue reported at $ 2 billion in 2023, and the clear success of its products have the company well set to continue bringing advanced AI to the public.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
42% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 10 rounds)
Feb 2026
$110bn
LATE VC
Dec 2025
$1bn
LATE VC
Total funding: $179.9bn
Company benefits
- Health/Dental/Vision Insurance
- Flexible spending account for healthcare and dependent care
- Mental healthcare service
- Fertility treatment coverage
- 401(k) with generous matching
- 20-week paid parental leave
- Life insurance (complimentary)
- AD&D insurance (complimentary)
- Short-term/long-term disability insurance (complimentary)
- Optional buy-up life insurance
- Flexible work hours and unlimited paid time off (we encourage 4+ weeks per year)
- Annual learning & development stipend
- Regular team happy hours and outings
- Daily catered lunch and dinner
- Travel to domestic conferences
Company HQ
Mission District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Sam Altman
(CEO)Former Y Combinator President & Chairman.
Ilya Sutskever
(Chief Scientist)Initially served as the company's Research Director, then became Chief Scientist in 2018. Co-founded DNNResearch and previously worked at Google as a Research Scientist.
Greg Brockman
(President & Chairman)Previously served as CTO of the company. Founding Engineer and former CTO of Stripe.
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