Software Engineer, Agent Platform
OpenAI is hiring a Software Engineer, Agent Platform in San Francisco, United States. It pays $230k-$385k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on OpenAI.
Level's read on this job
- Works on AI ●●●○ is how Level rates this software engineer role: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- The listed pay starts 38% above the typical software engineer posting on Level.
- The posting allows some remote work.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include AI agents and AI research.
- Level lists 809 other open roles at OpenAI.
AI in this role
About the Team
The Agent Platform team at OpenAI builds the production systems that bring useful AI agents to users around the world. We provide the platform that enables agents to execute code, use tools, and interact with software reliably and securely at scale.
We work closely with product, research, and infrastructure teams to turn new agent capabilities into dependable product experiences. Our work spans the execution environments, APIs, and integrations that support agentic products such as Codex and tool use in ChatGPT.
We focus on how agents run in production: making it easy to launch new capabilities, supporting growing demand, and improving the performance and reliability of the systems behind user experiences.
Some of the hardest problems in making agents useful emerge when they meet real-world workloads. We build the platform that helps agents handle those workloads safely, recover when things go wrong, and deliver consistent results.
About the Role
As a Software Engineer on the Agent Platform team, you will build and scale the services that power agentic products at OpenAI. You’ll work closely with product engineers, researchers, and infrastructure engineers to bring new capabilities from early prototypes to production.
Your work will include designing APIs and services, improving agent execution and orchestration, and building the integrations needed to support increasingly capable agents. You’ll help launch new experiences while strengthening the reliability, observability, and efficiency of the platform underneath them.
We’re looking for engineers with experience building large-scale backend systems or infrastructure who enjoy working close to products and users. You should be comfortable moving quickly through ambiguous problems while making thoughtful decisions about security, performance, and long-term maintainability.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role, you will:
Build and operate production services that enable agents to execute code, use tools, and interact with external systems.
Design APIs and platform abstractions that make it easier for product teams to build and launch agentic experiences.
Develop orchestration systems that manage agent execution, state, resource allocation, retries, and recovery.
Improve platform reliability, latency, and efficiency through performance optimization, observability, and capacity planning.
Partner with product, research, security, and infrastructure teams to bring new agent capabilities into production.
Own systems through their full lifecycle, from design and implementation to rollout, monitoring, and ongoing operation.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have experience building and operating large-scale backend services, distributed systems, or cloud infrastructure.
Enjoy building shared platforms and APIs that help other engineers move faster.
Can take an early prototype, turn it into a reliable service, and evolve it as usage grows.
Have a strong understanding of system performance, concurrency, failure modes, and resource management.
Care about how infrastructure decisions affect the user experience, including responsiveness, reliability, and predictable behavior.
Are comfortable working across service boundaries and collaborating with teams to solve problems from end to end.
Have experience with cloud platforms, containers, orchestration systems, or infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform.
Are interested in secure execution environments, sandboxing, and the challenges of running agent workloads in production.
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
Software Engineer, Agent Platform at OpenAI rates 63 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
Also common in software engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- This job starts at
- $230k
- Typical software engineer job
- $167k
This posting starts 38% 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?
- Describe a typical day in a role like this one: which parts run through AI directly?
- If you removed AI from this role, what would be left, and how do you decide what still needs a human?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI agents and AI Research. 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.
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