---
title: 'Founding Software Engineer, Physical Engineering at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-software-engineer-physical-engineering-openai-san-francisco-emkz2s7fmw33'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-05'
---

# Founding Software Engineer, Physical Engineering at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $347k–$445k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-26
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/2c646ef9-6f93-4124-9d51-964d2c5aa783

## Job description

## About the Team

The Physical Engineering team sits within OpenAI’s Enterprise Verticals organization. We’re exploring how frontier AI can help people design, simulate, and build better physical products—shortening development cycles, improving product performance, and expanding what engineering teams can accomplish. Our initial focus is on mechanical and electrical engineering. We’re building experiences within ChatGPT and integrations with engineering software to help engineers move from early concepts through design, simulation, and preparation for production. We operate as a small founding team within OpenAI, working directly with customers and closely with research, design, and forward deployed engineers. We learn by building, putting products in users’ hands, and using their feedback to guide our next steps.

## About the Role

As a Founding Full Stack Software Engineer, you’ll help define and build the product and technical foundations of this new vertical. You’ll work across frontend experiences, backend services, and integrations to bring AI into complex engineering workflows. You’ll combine strong software engineering fundamentals with product judgment and an eye for intuitive user experiences. Working directly with engineers and design partners, you’ll identify valuable problems, prototype solutions, and develop them into reliable products. We’re particularly interested in engineers who have built CAD, CAE, simulation, or other engineering design software. You should be comfortable owning work independently, making decisions with incomplete information, and moving between product details and system architecture. This is an opportunity to shape a new product area from its earliest stages, with significant influence over what we build, how it works, and the team we become.

In this role, you will:

- Build and ship full-stack AI products that help mechanical and electrical engineers work through design and simulation tasks.
- Own projects from customer discovery and prototyping through production deployment and iteration.
- Create intuitive interfaces that help users understand, inspect, and refine complex engineering outputs.
- Develop backend services, APIs, plugins, and integrations that connect OpenAI models with engineering software.
- Work directly with customers to understand engineering constraints, identify valuable applications, and translate specific needs into broadly useful products.
- Partner with research, design, platform, and forward deployed engineering teams to bring emerging AI capabilities into practical workflows.
- Evaluate quality and reliability, using customer feedback and product evidence to understand whether we’re improving how engineers work.
- Help establish the technical foundations and engineering practices of a growing team.

You might thrive in this role if you:

- Have independently built and shipped substantial software products, with ownership across frontend and backend systems.
- Bring strong product instincts and UI judgment, especially for tools that make complex work easier to understand and perform.
- Enjoy working directly with users and translating their needs into thoughtful product and technical decisions.
- Can turn an ambiguous opportunity into a clear starting point and a working product.
- Move quickly, make pragmatic tradeoffs, and stay accountable for quality after launch.
- Learn unfamiliar tools and domains quickly and communicate clearly across disciplines.
- Are excited about applying frontier AI to the design and development of physical products.

Particularly relevant experience

- Building CAD, CAE, simulation, electrical design, or related professional software.
- Developing interactive tools for visual, spatial, or technically complex workflows.
- Connecting engineering tools through APIs, plugins, or extensions.
- Building AI-powered applications and evaluating their usefulness and reliability.
- Taking a product from concept to production as a founder or early engineer.

## 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. [OpenAI Homepage](https://openai.com/)

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