---
title: 'Software Engineer, ChatGPT Shopping at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-chatgpt-shopping-openai-san-francisco-nh31vjchgx06'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Software Engineer, ChatGPT Shopping at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $347k–$445k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-07-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/ca54cd23-2bcc-4327-bcb6-46d81ed414a8

## Job description

## About the Team

ChatGPT is evolving from answering questions to becoming a deeply personalized assistant that helps people discover, create, and make decisions across everyday life. We're building new multimodal product experiences that combine language, images, personalization, and interactive interfaces to help millions of users accomplish tasks in entirely new ways. This team sits at the intersection of AI research, product engineering, design, and consumer experiences. We move quickly, ship frequently, and work on products that define how people interact with AI every day.

## About the Role

We're looking for exceptional full stack product engineers who love building polished consumer experiences from the ground up. You'll work across frontend, backend, AI-powered workflows, and rich interactive interfaces to create new product experiences that blend conversation, visual understanding, personalization, and commerce. You'll collaborate closely with designers, researchers, product managers, and model teams to rapidly prototype, launch, and iterate on experiences used by millions of people. This is an opportunity to help invent entirely new interaction paradigms—not just build traditional web applications. In This Role, You Will

- Design and build end-to-end product experiences across web services, APIs, and modern frontend applications.
- Partner closely with product, design, and research to rapidly prototype and launch new AI-native experiences.
- Build intuitive, performant interfaces that make advanced AI capabilities feel simple and delightful.
- Develop scalable backend systems that power personalized, real-time product experiences.
- Work with multimodal capabilities including text, images, and interactive UI components.
- Iterate quickly using user feedback, experimentation, and product metrics.
- Help define engineering standards, architecture, and technical direction for a fast-growing product area.

You Might Thrive If You

- Have significant experience building consumer-facing products end to end.
- Are comfortable moving across frontend, backend, infrastructure, and product architecture.
- Care deeply about craft, user experience, and product quality.
- Enjoy ambiguity and are energized by taking ideas from zero to one.
- Think like both an engineer and a product builder.
- Have strong systems thinking while maintaining exceptional attention to detail.
- Communicate well across engineering, design, product, and research teams.

## Preferred Qualifications

- Strong experience with modern frontend technologies (React, TypeScript, Next.js, or similar).
- Experience building scalable backend services using Python, Go, Node.js, Rust, or comparable technologies.
- Familiarity with distributed systems, APIs, and cloud infrastructure.
- Experience building highly interactive consumer products.
- Background working with AI, machine learning products, search, recommendations, personalization, or multimodal systems is a plus.
- A track record of shipping products quickly while maintaining engineering quality.

What Success Looks Like Successful engineers on this team combine strong technical execution with excellent product judgment. They move fluidly between prototyping and production systems, collaborate effectively across disciplines, and consistently deliver experiences that feel intuitive, elegant, and magical to users. They are excited by fast iteration, comfortable making decisions with imperfect information, and motivated by building products that redefine how people use AI every day.

## Why OpenAI

At OpenAI, you'll work alongside some of the world's best researchers, engineers, designers, and product thinkers to build AI that benefits everyone. We value curiosity, ownership, humility, and a bias toward shipping impactful products. If you're excited about inventing new consumer experiences powered by frontier AI—and want to help shape the future of how millions of people interact with technology—we'd love to hear from you.

## 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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