Software Engineer, Product Infrastructure - Agent Runtime

Codex - Engineering - San Francisco

About the Team

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Agent Runtime builds the shared agent primitives and compute runtime that power OpenAI products and applications. As agents take on more complex, longer-running tasks, we build the systems that let them maintain state, use tools, and work reliably in the environments they need.

We work closely with Research, Product, and infrastructure teams to turn advances in model capabilities into useful products. Our work combines deep systems engineering with a clear understanding of customer needs, creating reusable foundations that help teams build and scale new agent experiences.

About the Role

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We’re looking for a software engineer with strong product infrastructure experience to build the services, APIs, and runtime capabilities behind persistent agents. You’ll focus on the product infrastructure that makes agent workflows reliable and scalable, including persistent state, asynchronous execution, orchestration, and visibility into work in progress.

You’ll bring product judgment to infrastructure decisions: understanding how people and developers use agents, translating those needs into clear abstractions, and owning systems from design through launch and production operation. You’ll work closely with partner teams to deliver new capabilities while strengthening the shared foundations they depend on.

In this role, you will:

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• Design, build, and operate backend services, APIs, and reusable runtime primitives that support agent experiences across products.
• Build systems for persistent agent state, asynchronous execution, orchestration, and progress reporting so agents can carry work forward over time.
• Develop infrastructure that connects agents with tools and execution environments, with clear interfaces and safe, reliable behavior.
• Improve reliabilityance through observability, production debugging, failure recovery, and thoughtful system design.
• Partner with Product, Research, and engineering teams to turn emerging capabilities and customer needs into reusable infrastructure.
• Own projects end to end, balancing rapid iteration with maintainable architecture and the operational demands of systems used across products.

Your background might look something like:

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• 7+ years of professional software engineering experiences.
• A track record of designing, shipping, and operating production services, APIs, and data models that support complex product workflows.
• Strong distributed systems fundamentals and experience reasoning about state, concurrency, asynchronous work, and failure recovery.
• Experience building production systems in Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript, or similar languages, and the ability to work across service and infrastructure boundaries.
• Experience improving reliability and performance, using observability and debugging to understand system behavior and resolve production issues.
• Strong product judgment and developer empathy, with an ability to translate ambiguous needs into clear APIs, useful abstractions, and pragmatic technical tradeoffs.
• An ability to collaborate across product and infrastructure teams, communicate design decisions clearly, and take ownership from early exploration through production.
• Interest in AI agents and how they execute real work. Experience with agent runtimes, workflow orchestration, or execution environments is helpful 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

$266K – $445K + 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.