--- title: 'Applied AI Software Engineer, GTM Growth Engineering at OpenAI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/applied-ai-software-engineer-gtm-growth-engineering-openai-san-francisco-8skn33zg0e69' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-05' --- # Applied AI Software Engineer, GTM Growth Engineering at OpenAI - **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai) - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $266k–$405k - **Employment:** full-time - **Posted:** 2026-07-25 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-05 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/38e3c4bf-a632-405e-9619-b87382ca2472 ## Job description ## About the Team GTM Growth Engineering builds AI-native products that help OpenAI's go-to-market and B2B marketing organizations scale with greater speed, intelligence, and operational effectiveness. We apply OpenAI models to real business workflows and build the systems that make those applications useful and dependable: customer context, agent behavior, feedback, evaluation, experimentation, and appropriate human oversight. Our work brings together software engineering, applied AI, product, data, and GTM operations. We measure success through the quality of customer engagement, pipeline, conversion, and the effectiveness of our sales and marketing teams. ## About the Role We're looking for an Applied AI Engineer to build production systems that help AI-powered go-to-market workflows improve over time. You will connect agent behavior, customer and operator feedback, evaluation, experimentation, and business outcomes to make these systems more effective, reliable, and responsive to evolving customer needs. This is a deeply technical, cross-functional role with end-to-end ownership of the agent improvement loop: understand production behavior, identify failure modes, improve how the system decides or acts, and validate the resulting impact. You will partner with Engineering, Product, Data Science, Sales, and B2B Marketing to turn real-world signals into safer, more effective agent behavior and measurable improvements in customer engagement, conversion, qualified pipeline, and team productivity. In this role, you will: - Own the production improvement loop across agent behavior, customer and operator feedback, evaluation, experimentation, and verified business outcomes. - Instrument agent workflows so model interactions, tool use, decisions, failures, human edits, and downstream outcomes can be understood in context. - Define meaningful quality standards, representative evaluation datasets, regression coverage, and production monitoring for real GTM workflows. - Investigate why agents underperform across context, knowledge, instructions, tools, routing, guardrails, or workflow design. - Design and ship targeted behavior improvements, including changes to prompting, context construction, decision logic, tool use, and human-review paths. - Build backend services, APIs, data models, and feedback pipelines that make agent behavior observable, steerable, and reproducible. - Run controlled experiments, production replays, or staged rollouts to measure whether changes improve quality and downstream business results. - Partner with Product, Data Science, Sales, and B2B Marketing to prioritize high-value problems and define customer and business success. - Ship with appropriate safeguards for privacy, security, reliability, human oversight, and safe operational rollout. You might be a great fit if you have: - 4+ years of software, backend, applied AI, or product-engineering experience building reliable production systems. - Experience building AI agents, LLM-powered applications, or other model-driven workflows that operated on real production traffic. - Experience diagnosing and improving agent behavior using production traces, user feedback, evaluation, experimentation, or careful systems design. - Practical experience with evaluation design, regression testing, human or model grading, online quality signals, or controlled experiments. - Strong backend engineering skills across Python, APIs, data pipelines, stateful workflows, and production services. - Strong product judgment and the ability to connect technical changes to customer experience, conversion, qualified pipeline, or operational efficiency. - Comfort working across model behavior, context, knowledge, tools, workflow state, and human-in-the-loop decisions. - The ability to work closely with technical and non-technical partners across Engineering, Product, Data Science, Sales, and B2B Marketing. - A pragmatic mindset: you can scope ambiguous problems, ship useful improvements, and build toward a durable system. You Might Thrive If - You want to build AI systems that improve from real usage instead of stopping at a successful prototype. - You enjoy tracing messy production failures back to the decision, context, tool interaction, or workflow issue that caused them. - You think evaluation is valuable when it helps teams make better product decisions and improve real outcomes. - You are comfortable moving between applied AI, backend engineering, experimentation, and product judgment. - You like partnering with operators, sales teams, and marketers to understand the work your systems need to improve. - You can move from an ambiguous problem to a focused experiment, measured result, and durable implementation. - You care about trustworthy deployment, clear human-review paths, and reliable production systems. ## Nice to Have - Experience building agent evaluation, observability, experimentation, or AI infrastructure products. - Experience with production replay, LLM grading, human-labeled datasets, shadow evaluation, or staged rollout. - Experience improving model or agent behavior through context design, prompting, tools, decision logic, or feedback loops. - Experience with sales, B2B marketing, revenue, CRM, campaign, or other GTM-facing systems. - Experience measuring customer engagement, qualified pipeline, conversion, or operational efficiency. ## 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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