Software Engineer, OpenAI Presence

Codex - Engineering - San Francisco

About the Team

OpenAI Presence for reliable AI agents that carry out high-volume business workflows. We focus on specific use cases such as customer support, sales, and insurance claims, helping organizations put agents to work in production.

The Presence platform supports the agent development lifecycle, including evaluation, deployment, and improvement through real interactions. It connects agents to company systems and supports voice and chat experiences, with policies, guardrails, and human handoffs to help businesses stay in control. Read the launch announcement.

About the Role

We’re looking for an engineer to help shape the foundations of Presence and build the systems that make AI agents dependable in everyday business operations. You’ll help set the platform’s technical direction while staying close to the code reliably at scale.

You’ll bring deep backend expertise and the product judgment to connect what we build with how businesses use it. The work centers on the services that power Presence and extends across the stack—giving you scope to shape both the underlying systems and the experiences they enable.

In this role, you will:

• Provide hands-on technical leadership.
• Design and build backend systems for reliable, high-volume agent workflows in support, sales, and other enterprise use cases.
• Develop platform capabilities that support agent development and learning from real-world use.
• Identify and address reliability bottlenecks as agent workflows become more complex and usage grows.
• Work across backend infrastructure and product experiences as needed, collaborating with other engineers to turn evolving requirements into working software.

Your background might look something like:

• 9+ years of professional engineering experience, or product engineering roles.
• A track record of hands-on technical leadership, including setting architecture, breaking complex problems into clear implementation plans, and guiding engineers through delivery.
• Deep backend engineering and systems design skills, with proficiency in at least one backend programming language and experience designing services, data models, and interfaces that remain reliable as usage grows.
• End-to-end ownership of complex systems or product capabilities, from ambiguous requirements and technical design through implementation, launch, and production iteration.
• Strong production engineering judgment: you can diagnose difficult failuresance and scalability, and improve reliability through testing, observability, and operational discipline.
• Strong product judgment that connects technical decisions to user needs, with the ability to balance delivery speed, reliability, security, and long-term maintainability.
• The ability to move between backend infrastructure and product experiences, contribute across the stack when needed, and quickly learn unfamiliar systems, tools, and domains.
• Clear technical communication and effective collaboration across disciplines, including explaining trade-offs, creating alignment, and driving complex work forward while remaining hands-on.
• Experience with AI agents, enterprise workflows, integrations, or agent development and evaluation is a plus, but not required.

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 the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employeration, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable lawation technology systems and related data security obligations.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

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.

Compensation

$230K – $385K + Offers Equity

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factorsance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
• 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
• Mental health and wellness support
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
• Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.

This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.