--- title: 'Applied AI Engineer, Agent Enablement at OpenAI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/applied-ai-engineer-agent-enablement-openai-san-francisco-sjs0wsqhsjf4' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-17' --- # Applied AI Engineer, Agent Enablement at OpenAI - **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai) - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $197k–$280k - **Employment:** full-time - **Posted:** 2026-07-21 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-17 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/c1a28411-266b-487b-8ef3-03efb254fc36 ## Job description ## About the team The Agent Enablement Applied AI Engineering team works across engineering, product, design, partnerships, and strategic customers to grow an open ecosystem of agent-enabled sites and services. We help partners adopt the OpenAI tech stack related to identity, permissioning, agent-auth primitives so users can safely connect ChatGPT and Codex to the tools, services, and workflows they already use. Our team also works with external partners on defining the standards for agent access, marketplace offerings as well as other agent enablement initiatives to ensure users of ChatGPT and Codex go from intent to task completion seamlessly. ## About the role We are looking for an Applied AI Engineer to help strategic partners design, build, validate, launch, and operate agent enablement integrations across web applications, connectors, APIs, CLIs, MCP servers, and developer tools. This is a hands-on, partner-facing product engineering role for someone who can contribute to the platform itself, lead sophisticated technical engagements, and turn ambiguous identity and agent-workflow requirements into secure, production-ready integrations. You will work across partner product and engineering teams and OpenAI’s product, engineering, design, partnerships, legal, policy, security, support, and go-to-market teams. You will identify high-value user journeys, choose the right integration path, prototype and review architectures, write code, run evaluations and dogfood, trace failures end to end, guide launch and rollout, and support post-launch iteration. The best person for this role moves fluidly between full-stack code, OAuth/OIDC and identity systems, product judgment, project leadership, and clear communication with engineers and executives. This role is a fit for a product-minded engineer who wants to stay close to users and partners while going deep on authentication, permissions, reliability, safety, and developer experience. The principle objective is to help partners ship low-friction, trustworthy agent experiences that work across real-world account states, enterprise constraints, and user expectations. This role is based in our San Francisco office. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: - Own the technical partner journey for priority agent enablement integrations—from use-case selection and readiness assessment through architecture, prototype, implementation, evaluation, launch, rollout, and ongoing maintenance. - Help partners choose and implement the right integration path across browser sign-in, connector-initiated OAuth, and agentic account linking or provisioning, with clear user journeys and safe fallback behavior. - Write production and sample code, build reference implementations and test harnesses, and create the technical guidance, integration checklists, evaluations, and debugging tools that move partners from concept to production. - Debug identity and agent workflows end to end: user interface state, browser redirects, PKCE/OIDC transactions, token exchange and validation, account mapping, connector callbacks, CLI or MCP handoffs, latency, retries, rate limits, logs, traces, and metrics. - Review partner architectures and implementation plans for API contracts, scopes and permissions, consent, terms acceptance, and account policy, secret handling, data boundaries, privacy, reliability, and long-term maintainability. - Run hands-on evaluations, dogfood, launch-readiness reviews, staged rollouts, and post-launch investigations; turn findings into concrete fixes rather than one-off workarounds. - Contribute targeted improvements to ChatGPT, Codex, and the Agent Enablement platform, including identity protocols, APIs, SDKs, docs, examples, internal tooling, partner-debugging workflows, launch guardrails, and user-facing consent or control experiences. - Work closely with product, engineering, design, partnerships, legal, policy, security, support, and go-to-market teams to make partner launches smooth, safe, and repeatable. - Bring structured signals from partners back to product and engineering, and turn recurring integration patterns into platform requirements, reference architectures, playbooks, and developer guidance. You’ll thrive in this role if you: - Have 4–6 years of professional software engineering or AI engineering experience and are strong enough technically to contribute to the platform itself while still enjoying hands-on coding. - Have operated in a customer or partner facing roles in scoping projects, building MVPs, presenting trade-offs in solution design and architecture, understanding user value drivers as well as scoping and executing on tight implementation plans. - Have built and operated production full-stack products, APIs, backend services, developer platforms, connectors, or integrations, and can reason across frontend, backend, auth, data models, reliability, privacy, and UX constraints. - Have a strong understanding of how plugins and connectors work with coding agents, integrating MCP servers, using CLIs and APIs to access external tools. - Can work comfortably with external engineers, product leaders, and executives, and translate partner feedback into crisp technical plans and product improvements. - Are comfortable with ambiguity and rapidly changing conditions, and can turn high-level ideas into runnable prototypes, API contracts, technical specs. - Balance urgency with judgment and can keep complex partner launches moving while staying precise about the details that matter. Preferred qualifications: - High-level understanding of the identity stack, including how OAuth works. - Experience designing or operating APIs, webhooks, schemas, SDKs, CLIs, MCP servers, tool-calling systems, or other developer-facing integrations. - Prior customer-facing or partner-facing engineering experience, including leading technical calls, navigating ambiguity, and helping external teams ship production software. - Strong familiarity with AI products, LLM APIs, ChatGPT or Codex surfaces, coding harnesses, developer platforms, agent workflows, or ecosystem products. - Experience with evaluations, staged rollouts, observability, incident response, launch operations, and turning production learnings into durable platform improvements. ## About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. For additional information, please see [OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf). Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through [this form](https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA). No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this [link](https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241). [OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf) At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology. ## About OpenAI ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. - **Entity Type**: Private – structured as a nonprofit parent (OpenAI Foundation) governing a for-profit public benefit corporation (OpenAI Group). The company has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, signaling a potential future IPO. - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA - **Founded**: 2015 - **Founders**: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and others ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence research and deployment - **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises via API and platform), B2C (ChatGPT users), and developers (API, open-source models) - **Mission**: To ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity. ## Products & Services - **[ChatGPT](https://openai.com/chatgpt)**: Conversational AI assistant available via web and mobile, used by consumers and integrated into enterprise workflows. - **[GPT-4 API](https://openai.com/product)**: Large language model accessed via API for developers to build AI-powered applications (text generation, summarization, code assistance, etc.). - **[DALL-E](https://openai.com/dall-e-3)**: Image generation model that creates images from natural language descriptions. - **[Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper)**: Open-source speech recognition system. - **[OpenAI Agents](https://openai.com/)**: Emerging product category focused on autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks on behalf of users (announced June 2026). ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed in the provided sources. Widely reported in the press at ~$300 billion as of early 2026 (post-funding round), but this figure is not confirmed by OpenAI’s official materials. - **Key Metric**: Total funding exceeds $13 billion from Microsoft and other investors. The company has also confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC (see [openai.com](https://openai.com/) – “Confidential submission of draft S-1”). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Microsoft (strategic partner and largest investor), with additional participation from Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others. - **Growth Signals**: Active hiring with 721 open roles posted; expansion into agent-based products; confidential IPO filing; continued deployment of frontier models. ## Competitive Advantages - **First-mover & brand recognition**: ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, establishing OpenAI as the household name in generative AI. - **Research leadership**: Consistently publishes cutting-edge research (GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Whisper, etc.) and attracts top AI talent. - **Compute & infrastructure**: Exclusive partnership with Microsoft provides massive cloud computing resources (Azure) for training and inference. - **Unique governance structure**: The nonprofit parent ensures mission alignment (AGI benefiting humanity) while the for-profit arm can raise capital and scale products. ## Strategic Focus - **Safe AGI development**: Continued emphasis on safety research, alignment, and responsible deployment (e.g., safety systems, model provenance). - **Enterprise expansion**: Growing ChatGPT Enterprise and API offerings for businesses. - **Agentic AI**: Building autonomous agents that can “transform work” (announced June 2026). - **IPO preparation**: Confidential S-1 filing indicates intent to go public, which will require increased financial transparency and governance maturity. ## Why Work Here - **Culture & values**: OpenAI’s stated values include “Humanity first,” “Act with humility,” “Feel the AGI,” and “Ship joy.” Operating principles emphasize agency, creativity, rapid iteration, and intense focus. - **Benefits**: Competitive health insurance, mental healthcare support, 24-week paid birth-parent leave (plus 20 weeks for other parents), generous PTO, annual learning & development stipend, daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), and a domestic conference budget. - **Work environment**: Hybrid/office-based (San Francisco headquarters). The company offers a residency program for researchers and engineers transitioning into AI. - **Impact**: Employees work directly on frontier AI models that shape the industry and society. The mission-driven nature attracts talent passionate about AGI’s societal implications. ## Sources 1. [OpenAI About Page](https://openai.com/about/) 2. [OpenAI Careers Page](https://openai.com/careers/) 3. [OpenAI Job Search](https://openai.com/careers/search) 4. 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