--- title: 'Senior Software Engineer - Research Platform, Consumer Devices at OpenAI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-research-platform-consumer-devices-openai-san-francisco-3agywetj6hvm' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-10' --- # Senior Software Engineer - Research Platform, Consumer Devices at OpenAI - **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai) - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $293k–$325k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-06-26 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/6d9925f4-3d0a-4710-8304-032d0080d12d/application **Skills:** Full-stack development, Web applications, Backend services, APIs, Data models, Generative AI, Multimodal models, Model-evaluation systems, Distributed workflows, Production infrastructure debugging, Synthetic data generation, Simulation, Conversational AI, Speech, Video, Motion, Embodied interaction, Automated graders, Human evaluation, Supervised fine-tuning > Build tools and services for AI research, evaluation, and data generation workflows. Develop web applications, APIs, and backend systems to support multimodal research, synthetic data generation, and model evaluation while ensuring system reliability and reproducibility. ## Job description ## About the Team The Future of Computing Research team is an Applied Research team within the Consumer Devices group focused on developing new methods and models as we advance forward in our mission of building AGI that benefits all of humanity. As a Software Engineer on the Future of Computing Research team, you will work together with both the best ML researchers in the world and the greatest design talent of our generation to push the frontier of model capabilities. ## About the Role We are looking for a Software Engineer to join our team to build tools and services that enable AI research, evaluation, and data generation workflows. The best work in this role will start with an ambiguous design question and turn it into working research systems. You will work closely with researchers, designers, and engineers to build the evaluation systems, synthetic data generation pipelines, review tools, and supporting platform services. The goal is to make these workflows easier to create, run, and trust without requiring bespoke engineering support for each new design concept. You will help ensure that research artifacts have a clear lifecycle, runs are reproducible and observable, and results provide useful evidence for product and model-training decisions while the underlying systems remain reliable and reusable. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: - Build web applications, APIs, data models, and backend services for AI research workflows. - Build tools to author and manage evaluation tasks, rubrics, graders, suites, and rollout configurations, including workflows for publishing, versioning, auditing, and sharing research artifacts. - Automate evaluation runs and generate useful reports for design, research, and engineering teams. - Support synthetic data generation workflows for multimodal and conversational research, including tools that combine transcripts, media, and model comparisons. - Translate product and research questions into measurable scenarios, automated graders, and human-evaluation campaigns, and develop measures of task quality, coverage, diversity, and semantic spread. - Diagnose issues across application code, workers, model endpoints, deployments, and compute infrastructure, and improve reliability through health checks, observability, reproducible launch paths, data integrity safeguards, and automated verification. - Lead migrations and dependent changes across research tools, evaluation systems, and supporting services. - Partner closely with designers, model researchers, research engineers, and infrastructure teams, and onboard contributors to create high-quality evaluation and synthetic-data workflows. You might thrive in this role if you: - Have 7+ years of professional software engineering experience. - Have strong full-stack experience across web applications, backend services, APIs, and data models, including ownership of complex systems spanning multiple services or repositories. - Have expertise in generative AI, multimodal models, or model-evaluation systems. - Have built effective internal tools for both technical and non-technical users. - Are comfortable debugging distributed workflows and production infrastructure. - Have strong product judgment and can translate ambiguous requirements into concrete plans. - Are energized by working between designers and researchers in a multidisciplinary team, connecting qualitative judgment to rigorous evidence. - Communicate clearly and work effectively across engineering, design, and research. Nice to have: - Expertise in synthetic data generation, simulation, conversational AI, speech, video, motion, or embodied interaction. - Experience with automated graders, human evaluation, supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, or experiment- and dataset-management platforms. - Operated GPU-backed inference or rollout workloads at very large scale. ## 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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