Level

OpenAI

Backend Software Engineer - Codex for Finance

OpenAI is hiring a Backend Software Engineer - Codex for Finance for a remote role open to applicants in United States. It pays $347k-$385k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on OpenAI.

Level's read on this job

  • Level rates this software engineer role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
  • The listed pay starts 106% above the typical software engineer posting on Level.
  • The posting lists this role as remote.
  • Tools and skills the posting cites include Python, APIs and AI agents.
  • Level lists 793 other open roles at OpenAI.

AI in this role

Design and build backend systems, data pipelines, and agentic workflows to power AI-native financial products at scale.

pythonapis
ai-agentsai-researchbackenddistributed-systemsagentic-workflowsml-infra

About the Team

OpenAI for Financial Services is part of OpenAI's Verticals organization, which focuses on accelerating the economy and knowledge work. We build AI products for financial institutions and the professionals who power them, from investment bankers and research analysts to investors and other financial services teams.

We combine OpenAI's models, financial data, and enterprise knowledge to help professionals research companies, analyze markets, and produce high-quality work in the tools they use every day.

We're a small, entrepreneurial team working closely with customers and partners across research, product, design, engineering, and go-to-market to bring new capabilities from idea to production.

 

About the Role

We're looking for backend engineers to build the systems that make advanced AI useful, reliable, and trustworthy in financial services. You'll build the data systems, agentic workflows, and enterprise integrations behind our products. You'll also help bring them into production at some of the world's largest financial institutions.

This is a product-minded engineering role with significant ownership and zero-to-one building. You'll shape new products from the ground up, work directly with customers to understand their workflows, and collaborate across OpenAI to turn new model capabilities into products that professionals can trust with high-stakes work.

 

In this role, you will:

  • Design and build backend systems that power AI-native financial workflows across ChatGPT Work and Codex.

  • Build infrastructure to ingest, index, retrieve, and serve financial data, company filings, market information, and firm-specific knowledge at scale.

  • Develop integrations with financial data providers, enterprise knowledge systems, and customer environments, including the authentication, authorization, and entitlements required to use them securely.

  • Build the systems that let models and agents use the right tools and data, preserve source provenance, and produce accurate, verifiable outputs.

  • Improve the reliability, latency, observability, and quality of production systems, and develop evaluations that measure how well they perform on real financial workflows.

  • Work directly with financial institutions to understand customer needs, unblock deployments, and turn feedback into meaningful product improvements.

  • Partner with product, design, research, security, and other engineering teams to take new capabilities from early prototype to scaled production.


You might thrive in this role if you have:

  • 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong track record of building and operating production backend systems.

  • Proficiency in one or more backend languages, such as Python, Go, Rust, or TypeScript, and a strong foundation in APIs, data systems, and distributed systems.

  • Experience building data-intensive applications, search or retrieval systems, infrastructure platforms, or complex integrations.

  • Strong product instincts and the ability to move from an ambiguous customer problem to a practical, well-engineered solution.

  • Comfort working across the stack and organizational boundaries when that is what it takes to ship a great product.

  • A high bar for reliability, security, privacy, and performance, particularly in enterprise or other high-trust environments.

  • Interest in AI and how model capabilities can be applied to complex professional work; direct AI/ML or financial services experience is helpful but not required.

  • Experience as a founder, an early engineer at a startup, or an engineer who has helped build a new product from scratch is a plus.

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

Backend Software Engineer - Codex for Finance at OpenAI rates 85 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.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ 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

AI agentsAI ResearchBackendDistributed SystemsAgentic WorkflowsML InfraPythonAPIs

Also common in software engineer jobs at this level

Pay

This job starts at
$347k
Typical software engineer job
$168k

This posting starts 106% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
  2. Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
  3. Tell me about a project where backend was part of your work. What did you do?
  4. Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
  5. Tell me about a project where agentic workflows was part of your work. What did you do?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: AI agents, AI Research, Backend, Distributed Systems, and Agentic Workflows. 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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