OpenAI

Software Engineer, Integrity Foundations at OpenAI (San Francisco, CA)

OpenAI· San Francisco, CA· $266k–$445k·

Role details

Salary
$266k–$445k
Employment
Full-Time
Equity
Yes
Skills
Software EngineeringBackend ServicesData PipelinesTerraformKubernetesAzurePythonPostgresKafka
Benefits

Equity

OpenAI at a glance

Builds frontier AI models and ships them as consumer, developer, and enterprise products — ChatGPT, the API platform, and Codex.

Builds frontier AI models and ships them as consumer, developer, and enterprise products (ChatGPT, the OpenAI API platform, Codex, and an agent layer).

~$180B raised · latest: $122B round at an $852B valuation (2026) · backed by Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, SoftBank

Summary

Develop and enhance systems to detect and prevent abuse, such as financial fraud and scripting, while collaborating with cross-functional teams to mitigate adversarial attacks. The role involves designing infrastructure and tools to ensure the trustworthiness and security of AI platforms.

Job description

About the Team

The Applied Foundations team at OpenAI is dedicated to ensuring that our cutting-edge technology is not only revolutionary but also secure from a myriad of adversarial threats. We strive to maintain the integrity of our platforms as they scale. The Applied Foundations team is at the front lines of defending against financial abuse, scaled attacks, and other forms of misuse that could undermine the user experience or harm our operational stability. Integrity Foundations provides the core building blocks and infrastructure for this work.

About the Role

At OpenAI, our mission is to advance AI in a way that is safe, reliable, and aligned with broad societal values. The applied foundations role is crucial for maintaining the trustworthiness of our platforms. You will be pivotal in developing robust defenses against a spectrum of adversarial behaviors that threaten our ecosystem. In this role, you'll work with our entire engineering team to design and implement systems that detect and prevent abuse, promote user safety, and reduce risk across our platform. You'll be at the forefront of our efforts to ensure that the immense potential of AI is harnessed in a responsible and sustainable manner. In this role, you will:

  • Develop and enhance systems to detect and prevent various forms of abuse including financial fraud, botting, and scripting.
  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design solutions that protect against and mitigate adversarial attacks without compromising user experience.
  • Assist with response to active incidents on the platform and build new tooling and infrastructure that address the fundamental problems.

You might thrive in this role if you:

  • Have at least 3 years of professional software engineering experience.
  • Have experience setting up and maintaining production backend services and data pipelines.
  • Have a humble attitude, an eagerness to help your colleagues, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed.
  • Are self-directed and enjoy figuring out the best way to solve a particular problem
  • Own problems end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done.
  • Care about AI Safety in production environments and have the expertise to build software systems that defend against abuse.
  • Build tools to accelerate your own workflows, but only when off-the-shelf solutions would not do.

Our tech stack

  • Our infrastructure is built on Terraform, Kubernetes, Azure, Python, Postgres, and Kafka. While we value experience with these technologies, we are primarily looking for engineers with strong technical skills and the ability to quickly pick up new tools and frameworks.

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. 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. 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. OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy 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.

Why work at OpenAI

  • 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.

Application questions