Software Engineer, OpenAI Presence

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company working to ensure that advanced artificial intelligence systems benefit everyone. The company builds and deploys powerful AI products while keeping safety and human values central to its work.

The Applied AI team is looking for a Software Engineer to join OpenAI Presence, a platform within Enterprise Engineering that powers reliable AI agents handling high-volume business workflows. Presence helps organizations deploy agents for customer support, sales, insurance claims, and similar use cases—managing everything from agent development and evaluation through deployment and real-world improvement. You'll work on a system that connects agents to company infrastructure, supports voice and chat interfaces, and includes policies, guardrails, and human handoff capabilities so businesses maintain control.

What you'll do

• Guide architectural decisions and provide hands-on technical leadership across the Presence platform and its services.

• Design and build backend systems that handle reliable, high-volume agent workflows for enterprise customers in support, sales, and other domains.

• Develop platform features that enable agent development and learning from production interactions.

• Spot and fix reliability issues as agent workflows grow more complex and usage scales up.

• Move fluidly between backend infrastructure and product experiences, working with other engineers to translate requirements into shipped software.

What you'll bring

• At least 9 years of professional backend, platform, or product engineering experience (excluding internships).

• A demonstrated record of hands-on technical leadership, including setting architecture, decomposing complex problems, and guiding engineers through delivery.

• Strong backend and systems design fundamentals, fluency in at least one backend language, and experience building services and data models that scale reliably.

• End-to-end ownership of complex systems or product features—from unclear requirements through technical design, implementation, launch, and ongoing production work.

• Production engineering judgment: the ability to diagnose tough failures, reason about performance and scalability, and improve reliability through testing, observability, and operational discipline.

• Product judgment that connects technical choices to real user needs, balancing speed, reliability, security, and long-term maintainability.

• Comfort learning unfamiliar systems, tools, and domains quickly, and the ability to contribute across the stack when the work requires it.

• Clear communication of technical trade-offs and the ability to drive complex work forward while staying hands-on.

Nice to have

• Background with AI agents, enterprise integrations, or agent development and evaluation frameworks.