Applied AI Software Engineer, GTM Growth Engineering
OpenAI is hiring an Applied AI Software Engineer, GTM Growth Engineering in San Francisco, United States. It pays $266k-$405k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on OpenAI.
Level's read on this job
- On Level's scale, this software engineer role is Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
- Pay on this posting starts 58% higher than the typical software engineer posting on Level.
- The posting mentions Python, APIs and AI agents among its tools and skills.
- Level classes it as a mid-level role.
- OpenAI has 793 other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
Build and optimize production AI agent workflows and evaluation loops to scale go-to-market operations.
About the Team
GTM Growth Engineering builds AI-native products that help OpenAI's go-to-market and B2B marketing organizations scale with greater speed, intelligence, and operational effectiveness.
We apply OpenAI models to real business workflows and build the systems that make those applications useful and dependable: customer context, agent behavior, feedback, evaluation, experimentation, and appropriate human oversight.
Our work brings together software engineering, applied AI, product, data, and GTM operations. We measure success through the quality of customer engagement, pipeline, conversion, and the effectiveness of our sales and marketing teams.
About the Role
We're looking for an Applied AI Engineer to build production systems that help AI-powered go-to-market workflows improve over time. You will connect agent behavior, customer and operator feedback, evaluation, experimentation, and business outcomes to make these systems more effective, reliable, and responsive to evolving customer needs.
This is a deeply technical, cross-functional role with end-to-end ownership of the agent improvement loop: understand production behavior, identify failure modes, improve how the system decides or acts, and validate the resulting impact.
You will partner with Engineering, Product, Data Science, Sales, and B2B Marketing to turn real-world signals into safer, more effective agent behavior and measurable improvements in customer engagement, conversion, qualified pipeline, and team productivity.
In this role, you will:
Own the production improvement loop across agent behavior, customer and operator feedback, evaluation, experimentation, and verified business outcomes.
Instrument agent workflows so model interactions, tool use, decisions, failures, human edits, and downstream outcomes can be understood in context.
Define meaningful quality standards, representative evaluation datasets, regression coverage, and production monitoring for real GTM workflows.
Investigate why agents underperform across context, knowledge, instructions, tools, routing, guardrails, or workflow design.
Design and ship targeted behavior improvements, including changes to prompting, context construction, decision logic, tool use, and human-review paths.
Build backend services, APIs, data models, and feedback pipelines that make agent behavior observable, steerable, and reproducible.
Run controlled experiments, production replays, or staged rollouts to measure whether changes improve quality and downstream business results.
Partner with Product, Data Science, Sales, and B2B Marketing to prioritize high-value problems and define customer and business success.
Ship with appropriate safeguards for privacy, security, reliability, human oversight, and safe operational rollout.
You might be a great fit if you have:
4+ years of software, backend, applied AI, or product-engineering experience building reliable production systems.
Experience building AI agents, LLM-powered applications, or other model-driven workflows that operated on real production traffic.
Experience diagnosing and improving agent behavior using production traces, user feedback, evaluation, experimentation, or careful systems design.
Practical experience with evaluation design, regression testing, human or model grading, online quality signals, or controlled experiments.
Strong backend engineering skills across Python, APIs, data pipelines, stateful workflows, and production services.
Strong product judgment and the ability to connect technical changes to customer experience, conversion, qualified pipeline, or operational efficiency.
Comfort working across model behavior, context, knowledge, tools, workflow state, and human-in-the-loop decisions.
The ability to work closely with technical and non-technical partners across Engineering, Product, Data Science, Sales, and B2B Marketing.
A pragmatic mindset: you can scope ambiguous problems, ship useful improvements, and build toward a durable system.
You Might Thrive If
You want to build AI systems that improve from real usage instead of stopping at a successful prototype.
You enjoy tracing messy production failures back to the decision, context, tool interaction, or workflow issue that caused them.
You think evaluation is valuable when it helps teams make better product decisions and improve real outcomes.
You are comfortable moving between applied AI, backend engineering, experimentation, and product judgment.
You like partnering with operators, sales teams, and marketers to understand the work your systems need to improve.
You can move from an ambiguous problem to a focused experiment, measured result, and durable implementation.
You care about trustworthy deployment, clear human-review paths, and reliable production systems.
Nice to Have
Experience building agent evaluation, observability, experimentation, or AI infrastructure products.
Experience with production replay, LLM grading, human-labeled datasets, shadow evaluation, or staged rollout.
Experience improving model or agent behavior through context design, prompting, tools, decision logic, or feedback loops.
Experience with sales, B2B marketing, revenue, CRM, campaign, or other GTM-facing systems.
Experience measuring customer engagement, qualified pipeline, conversion, or operational efficiency.
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 Software Engineer, GTM Growth Engineering at OpenAI rates 90 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● 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
Also common in software engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- This job starts at
- $266k
- Typical software engineer job
- $168k
This posting starts 58% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
- Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
- Tell me about a project where applied ai was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where machine learning was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where backend engineering was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI agents, AI Research, Applied AI, Machine learning, and Backend Engineering. 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.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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