---
title: 'Principal Software Engineer, ChatGPT Education and Learning at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/principal-software-engineer-chatgpt-education-and-learning-openai-san-francisco-vwa0dsaa523w'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-05'
---

# Principal Software Engineer, ChatGPT Education and Learning at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-10-23
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/40de0618-fb19-443d-85fd-ba690d3721a8

## Job description

## About the Team

The ChatGPT Learning team creates the next generation of learning experiences within ChatGPT. Millions of people use ChatGPT each week to explore concepts, practice skills, and work through challenges, making learning one of the platform’s largest consumer use cases. We want ChatGPT to support sustained learning and progress over time, beyond answering individual questions. We’re exploring how AI can make powerful learning tools more accessible, helping people understand the world, develop skills, and pursue their goals. Our work brings together product engineering, design, AI research, and education to serve learners around the world.

## About the Role

As a Principal Software Engineer on the ChatGPT Learning team, you will set technical direction and lead the design and development of products that help millions of people learn with ChatGPT. You’ll remain hands-on across the stack, building polished interfaces and scalable backend services. Working closely with product managers, designers, researchers, and platform teams, you’ll bring new model capabilities into everyday learning experiences. You’ll drive product and design decisions alongside your cross-functional partners, helping define what we build, how it works, and how it serves learners. We’re looking for an engineer with strong product judgment who can turn ambiguous opportunities into clear direction, lead complex initiatives from concept through launch, and raise the quality of the team’s technical work. This position is based in San Francisco or New York City, with three days each week in the office. Relocation assistance is available to new employees.

## What You’ll Do

- Lead end-to-end development of learning experiences in ChatGPT, from early exploration through production and iteration.
- Drive product and design decisions with product managers and designers, bringing technical insight, user feedback, and sound judgment to priorities and tradeoffs.
- Set technical direction for complex initiatives and guide architecture decisions that support rapid experimentation and long-term reliability.
- Build multimodal learning capabilities that combine text, images, voice, and interactive interfaces.
- Develop scalable services and APIs to support learning features throughout ChatGPT.
- Work with researchers, platform teams, designers, and engineers to prototype ideas and bring new AI capabilities to users.
- Improve performance, reliability, and usability across ChatGPT’s learning surfaces, using experiments and user feedback to guide improvements.
- Support other engineers through mentorship, code reviews, and clear technical guidance.

You Might Thrive Here If You

- Have 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping high-quality products across the full stack.
- Have led complex technical initiatives and made architecture decisions that balance product needs, development speed, and maintainability.
- Have experience driving product and design decisions in close partnership with product managers and designers.
- Enjoy building consumer products and taking ownership from initial concept through production.
- Bring clarity to ambiguous problems and translate them into practical product solutions.
- Have strong product engineering instincts and care deeply about the quality of the user experience.
- Have experience building interactive educational tools or learning products.
- Have experience developing AI-powered applications or systems built around large language models.
- Want to build products with meaningful global impact and expand access to education and learning opportunities.

## 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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