Software Engineer, Codex Enterprise
OpenAI is hiring a Software Engineer, Codex Enterprise 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 37% above the typical software engineer posting on Level.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include AI agents and AI research.
- Level lists 795 other open roles at OpenAI.
AI in this role
About the Team
Codex is OpenAI’s coding agent, helping developers write, review, and debug software. The broader Codex group combines research, engineering, design, and product to advance what AI agents can do.
Codex Enterprise builds the agents and product capabilities that help organizations use Codex in their software development workflows. Unlike individual consumers, people at organizations work in teams, and our scope includes a product experience that works for those teams, building extensibility and discovery primitives, supporting enterprise administration and governance, and the capabilities that help us deploy Codex to organizations at scale. We help turn new agent capabilities into useful products that organizations can trust.
About the Role
We’re looking for a backend or backend-leaning full-stack engineer who pairs technical depth with strong product taste. You’ll build new products and major capabilities, help determine what shape they should take, and own the work from an ambiguous starting point through launch.
Working closely with product managers and Forward Deployed Engineers, you’ll turn emerging needs and deployment insights into scalable product capabilities. The emphasis is on deeply technical product building, independent problem-solving, and thoughtful decisions about both user experience and system design.
In this role, you will:
Shape new Codex Enterprise products and features, applying product judgment to decide what to build and how it should work.
Own projects from exploration through architecture, implementation, launch, and production operations, using feedback to guide ongoing iteration.
Build ecosystem capabilities such as plugins, skills, hooks, and discovery experiences, alongside services for enterprise administration, governance, and usage visibility.
Design reliable, secure, observable backend systems that support Codex experiences across web, IDEs, CLI, and CI/CD.
Partner with product managers and Forward Deployed Engineers to translate deployment learnings and user needs into reusable product improvements.
Ramp quickly in unfamiliar domains, surface edge cases, and communicate the trade-offs that shape durable technical decisions.
Your background might look something like:
Deep backend engineering experience, including production services and distributed systems. Backend-leaning full-stack engineers with substantial backend depth are also a strong fit.
Demonstrated ownership of a new product or major capability, taking it from an ambiguous starting point through launch.
Exceptional coding, software design, and debugging fundamentals, with proficiency in a backend language and the ability to reason independently through difficult technical problems.
Strong product judgment: you can identify the essential user problem, influence what gets built, and make practical trade-offs between speed, quality, and long-term maintainability.
Evidence of learning unfamiliar systems or domains quickly and adapting as product needs and technical constraints change.
Excellent communication and collaboration skills, including the ability to surface edge cases, explain technical decisions, and bring clarity to ambiguous problems.
Experience building enterprise products, integrations, or identity and governance capabilities is helpful, but not required.
Hands-on experience as a founder who brought a product to market, or a sustained track record of growing technical responsibility at a larger company, 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
Software Engineer, Codex Enterprise at OpenAI rates 69 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
- $168k
This posting starts 37% 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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