System Software Engineer, Applied Foundations jobs in United States
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OpenAI · 3 months ago

System Software Engineer, Applied Foundations

positionSan Francisco
timeFull-time
remoteOnsite
senioritySenior Level
money$255K/yr - $405K/yr
date5+ years exp

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. They are seeking a Software Engineer to work on large-scale distributed systems and security infrastructure, focusing on building and defending critical backend services.

Agentic AIArtificial Intelligence (AI)Foundational AIGenerative AIMachine LearningNatural Language ProcessingSaaS
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Growth Opportunities
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H1B Sponsor Likelynote

Responsibilities

Design and maintain systems and frameworks that enable effective identification and assessment of emergent risks (e.g., reasoning, instruction-following, or agentic behavior) supporting security and safety teams in catching issues before they lead to external incidents
Architect and build scalable, resilient backend systems and internal tooling to support a lean, high-efficiency operating model
Proactively probe systems to uncover latent bugs and failure modes before they manifest in production

Qualification

Distributed systemsSecurity infrastructureBackend servicesAIML systemsProactive investigationProblem-solvingCollaboration

Required

At least 5 years of software engineering experience working on distributed systems, platforms, or infrastructure
Deeply versed in potential failure modes of AI and ML systems (e.g. sycophancy, adversarial inputs, jailbreaks, harmful outputs) and have experience detecting or mitigating them
Enjoy working adjacent to research teams and translating novel technical ideas into production-grade, safe systems — rather than operating purely in product or commercial domains
Proactively investigate complex systems to uncover bugs, edge cases, and unexpected failure modes, using insights to strengthen reliability

Company

OpenAI

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OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company that develops advanced AI models, including ChatGPT. It is a sub-organization of OpenAI Foundation.
dateFounded in 2015
location
San Francisco, California, USA
people-size201-500 employees
web-link
https://www.openai.com

H1B Sponsorship

OpenAI has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (1)
2024 (1)
2023 (1)
2022 (18)
2021 (10)
2020 (6)

Funding

Current Stage
Growth Stage
Total Funding
$79B
Key Investors
The Walt Disney CompanySoftBankThrive Capital
2025-12-11Corporate Round· $1B
2025-10-02Secondary Market· $6.6B
2025-03-31Series Unknown· $40B

Leadership Team

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Sam Altman
CEO & Co-Founder
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Greg Brockman
President, Chairman, & Co-Founder
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Recent News

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2026-01-09
Indian Express
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2026-01-09
The Motley Fool
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Company data provided by crunchbase