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Software Engineer, Product Infrastructure - Agent Runtime

OpenAI· Applied AI
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Hybrid (San Francisco)$266k - $445kFull-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Software engineer role focused on product infrastructure for persistent agents, building services, APIs, and runtime capabilities to support agent workflows across OpenAI products.

Responsibilities

  • 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 reliability, scalability, and performance 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.

Qualifications

  • 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial ownership of backend systems, product infrastructure, or developer platforms.
  • 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.

Skills

Required:Backend engineeringDistributed systems

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
  • Mental health and wellness support
  • Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
  • Annual learning and development stipend
  • Daily meals in offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
  • Relocation support for eligible employees
  • Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends
Last updated Oct 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About OpenAI

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Company profileWebsite

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