Full-Stack Software Engineer, Child Safety Tools & Systems
OpenAI is hiring a Full-Stack Software Engineer, Child Safety Tools & Systems in San Francisco, United States. It pays $266k-$385k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Level.
AI in this role
Build AI-powered applications and intelligence systems to detect and disrupt child safety violations across OpenAI products.
About the Team
The Intelligence & Investigations Engineering team builds systems that detect, analyze, and disrupt abuse across OpenAI’s products. We partner closely with the Child Safety team and cross-functional groups to protect users while advancing OpenAI’s goal of developing AI that benefits everyone.
About the Role
As a Fullstack Engineer focused on child safety, you’ll build data-intensive, AI-powered applications and infrastructure that enable operators and investigators to work effectively and responsibly. You’ll adapt quickly in ambiguous, fast-moving environments to deliver well-crafted, reliable tooling for high-severity safety work.
*Candidates should understand this role involves exposure to sensitive and egregious content.
In this role, you will:
4+ years of experience as a software engineer
Prototype, build, and maintain intelligence systems that detect, triage, and enable efficient human review of possible high severity harm
Work hand in hand with operators and investigators, designing and delivering systems that enable them to do their work faster, more accurately, and more safely.
Develop across the stack: UIs, services, pipelines, and anything else required to solve the problems we face.
Interact with partners across Product Policy, Platform Integrity, Safety Systems, and Research
Contribute to the team’s technical strategy, especially for child safety related tools and systems
Report on impact in a data-driven fashion
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have a strong software engineering foundation and enjoy owning systems end-to-end—from infrastructure and data ingestion to frontend tooling
Are energized by working at the frontier of AI capabilities, integrating new models and APIs into practical systems
Have experience building and operating large-scale data pipelines or search/retrieval systems
Are proficient in Python and/or TypeScript, and familiar with tools like Spark, Kafka, Flink, data warehouses, and SQL
Take a product-minded approach, design with user workflows in mind, and iterate quickly based on feedback
Favor pragmatic solutions and can ship in hacky, low-support environments when needed
Are comfortable navigating ambiguity and open-ended problem spaces with evolving goals
Have prior experience working on engineering for high-severity harms
Bring intuition for the pain points and workflows of operations and investigative teams, and curiosity about solving complex investigations
Bonus: prior knowledge of child-safety-specific challenges such as secure handling of quarantined content and reporting to NCMEC
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
Full-Stack Software Engineer, Child Safety Tools & Systems at OpenAI rates 80 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. Open the description and count.
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
- Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
- Walk me through how you've used Python in your day-to-day work.
- What are the limits of TypeScript that you've run into, and how did you work around them?
- What's a project where you used Spark hands-on?
- Walk me through how you've used Kafka in your day-to-day work.
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI Research, Python, TypeScript, Spark, and Kafka. 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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