Backend Engineer, Consumer Devices

Backend Engineer, Consumer Devices at OpenAI

The Software Engineering team at OpenAI is responsible for designing and building the scalable, performant, and secure backend systems that power our products—from early prototypes to large-scale deployments. We collaborate closely with product, hardware, and full-stack teams to ensure our infrastructure enables fast iteration while setting a strong foundation for long-term growth.

As a Backend Engineer, Consumer Devices, you will design and build services, APIs, and infrastructure that support evolving product needs. You’ll apply a deep understanding of backend systems and maintain enough end-to-end context—from hardware to cloud—to guide technical decisions that best serve the product and team.

We’re looking for engineers who thrive in fast-paced, collaborative environments and care deeply about building robust systems that scale.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of four days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In This Role, You Will

• Architect, build, and maintain high-performance, secure backend systems.
• Design APIs, data models, and infrastructure to support evolving product needs.
• Balance near-term development velocity with long-term maintainability and scalability.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure cohesive, end-to-end solutions.

You Might Thrive In This Role If You

• Have 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a focus on backend systems.
• Have a proven track record of building and scaling systems from early stage to large scale.
• Are proficient with Python and Go, and familiar with a range of server-side technologies.
• Have a strong grasp of system design, performance optimization, and security best practices.
• Can reason about full-stack tradeoffs from hardware through cloud infrastructure.
• (Nice to have) Have experience with distributed systems and cloud architectures.
• (Nice to have) Bring a background in instrumentation, analytics, and performance tuning.
• (Nice to have) Are familiar with hardware-cloud integrations or applied AI services.

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.

Key skills/competency

• Backend Systems
• API Design
• Data Modeling
• Python
• Go
• System Design
• Performance Optimization
• Security Best Practices
• Distributed Systems
• Cloud Architecture