Applied AI Engineer, Codex
OpenAI is hiring an Applied AI Engineer, Codex in Sydney, Australia. Level rates it ; you can apply on OpenAI.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this AI engineer role Works on AI ●●●○: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include Python, Git and AI research.
- Level classifies it as a senior role.
- Level lists 819 other open roles at OpenAI.
AI in this role
Help enterprises integrate and deploy frontier AI coding workflows and agents as an Applied AI Engineer.
About the team
The Applied AI Engineering team helps enterprises put Codex to work on their most important engineering workflows. We work alongside customer engineers to turn frontier AI capabilities into systems that improve how software is built, shipped, secured, and operated.
Our work spans unfamiliar codebases, legacy systems, data pipelines, infrastructure, and enterprise integrations. We discover where AI can make a meaningful difference, build and prove solutions, and turn what we learn into reusable architectures, tools, and feedback that help shape Codex.
About the Role
We’re looking for an engineer who enjoys understanding complex systems, building alongside customers, and solving problems where the path forward isn’t obvious.
You’ll work directly with technical leaders and engineers to identify valuable opportunities and take them from discovery through implementation and evaluation. You might build a Codex-assisted release review workflow, modernize a legacy data pipeline, accelerate a dependency migration, or connect an agent to the systems and context it needs to investigate production incidents.
You’ll combine hands-on software engineering, architecture, and technical leadership to make Codex part of how customers get important work done. Success means delivering the agreed solution, demonstrating measurable improvement, and helping the customer sustain and expand its use. Working with our product, engineering, research, and account teams, you’ll turn deployment experience into evidence that informs improvements to Codex.
The position is based in Sydney, Australia, with three office days each week. Relocation assistance is available to new employees.
In this role, you will:
Lead customer engineering engagements from workflow discovery and architecture through implementation, evaluation, and handoff, with clear customer owners, delivery milestones, and measurable success criteria.
Assess customer repositories, data systems, infrastructure, security controls, and development practices to understand constraints, determine readiness, and identify where Codex can have the greatest impact.
Build and validate workflows alongside customer engineers, developing integrations, tool gateways, evaluation harnesses, reference implementations, and automations, often using Codex in your own development process.
Establish baselines, quality and security guardrails, and evaluation methods that demonstrate whether a workflow is reliable, useful, and ready to expand.
Turn customer engagements into reusable tools, architectures, and deployment patterns, and translate recurring challenges into actionable feedback for product, engineering, and research teams.
Document technical decisions and results for handoff and reuse, establishing clear customer, partner, or delivery-team ownership for production release, ongoing operation, and maintenance.
Use evidence to recommend when to expand a workflow, redirect an engagement, or stop work when value or feasibility cannot be demonstrated.
You’ll thrive in this role if you:
Have 5+ years of relevant experience in software development, deployment engineering, data or infrastructure engineering, technical consulting, or solutions architecture.
Can build, debug, and evaluate production-relevant software and quickly understand unfamiliar systems.
Actively use AI coding tools, have adapted them to your own work, and have a clear perspective on how agents can automate complete workflows.
Bring technical depth in one or more areas, such as software engineering, data systems, cloud infrastructure, or enterprise integrations, and enjoy learning across disciplines.
Understand how software is tested, released, and operated, and can reason about the security, reliability, and access requirements of enterprise environments.
Can turn an ambiguous customer problem into a practical technical plan with credible estimates, measurable acceptance criteria, and clear tradeoffs.
Communicate effectively with technical leaders and hands-on engineers, collaborate through uncertainty, and turn individual customer work into solutions others can reuse.
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.
We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy
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.
How we rate this
Applied AI Engineer, Codex at OpenAI rates 75 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Pay
- Typical AI engineer job
- $184k
This posting doesn't list pay. Use the typical AI engineer figure when pay comes up. See AI engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
- Tell me about a project where software engineering was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where applied ai was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where system integration was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where evaluation was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI Research, Software Engineering, Applied AI, System Integration, and Evaluation. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.
Get your CV reviewed before you apply
Send your CV and the role you want next. Your review arrives by email within 3 days.
Get new AI engineer jobs (Works on AI ●●●○ or higher) by email
One email a week, each job rated for how much AI is in the work. No recruiter spam, unsubscribe in one click.
Free.
Similar roles
Software Engineering roles that work on AI, at other companies.
What kind of AI work fits you?
Answer 12 practical questions in about three minutes. Get a simple profile, the work it points to, and live roles to explore next.
Find my next step