Software Engineer, Enterprise Controls

OpenAI is an AI research company focused on developing and safely deploying advanced AI systems. The company builds products like ChatGPT and Codex while prioritizing responsible development and broad access to AI's benefits. As part of the Applied AI team, you'll work on infrastructure that enables organizations to use OpenAI's tools securely and effectively.

The Enterprise Controls & Console team builds the permission, governance, and administration systems that let organizations confidently deploy and manage ChatGPT, Codex, and OpenAI APIs. Your work will touch every major product launch and help administrators maintain fine-grained control over access and security. You'll design scalable backend services that provide a shared controls foundation for internal teams launching new capabilities safely.

What you'll do

• Design and build backend services for permissions, authorization, and governance across OpenAI's product suite, ensuring enterprises can manage access with confidence.

• Develop sharing and collaboration features between people and agents, with clear access rules that administrators and users can understand and trust.

• Create reusable services and APIs supporting workspace administration and console experiences as OpenAI's products continue to evolve.

• Lead the architecture and delivery of complex initiatives, working with product and engineering partners to align on requirements, technical tradeoffs, and rollout strategies.

• Translate ambiguous enterprise needs into clear system behavior, predictable permissions, and maintainable code that other teams can build on.

• Ensure the reliability, security, and performance of production services through testing, observability, debugging, and ongoing improvements.

What you'll bring

• 9+ years of professional backend software engineering, building and operating production services at scale.

• Deep expertise in backend development and a proven track record shipping complex product or platform capabilities that customers depend on.

• Technical leadership experience across substantial initiatives, comfortable making architectural decisions and coordinating delivery while staying hands-on.

• Strong proficiency in languages like Python, Go, Rust, Java, or C++, with solid software design and systems fundamentals.

• Experience designing distributed services, APIs, and data models, understanding reliability, consistency, scalability, and performance tradeoffs.

• Background building authorization, permissions, or enterprise governance systems, with ability to translate access policies into reliable application behavior.

• Product judgment and communication skills to turn abstract user and administrator needs into practical technical solutions.

• Ownership mentality for production systems, skill diagnosing difficult failures, and commitment to improving security, testing, observability, and operational resilience.

What we offer

• Full-time role based in San Francisco.