Applied AI Engineer, API Platform, Digital Natives

📋 Job Overview

The Applied AI Engineering team is responsible for ensuring the safe and effective deployment of generative AI applications for developers and enterprises. We act as a trusted advisor and thought partner for our API customers, working to build an effective backlog of frontier AI use cases for their industry and drive them to production through strong technical guidance.

🏢 About OpenAI

OpenAI is a research laboratory that focuses on artificial intelligence. The company's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

🎯 The Role

You will combine deep technical judgment, hands-on engineering, and customer leadership to take ambitious ideas from use-case selection and architecture through prototyping, evaluation, production launch, and scale. You will write and debug code, build evaluation systems, resolve complex integrations, and guide decisions involving model behavior, reliability, latency, cost, safety, security, governance, and operational readiness. Success is measured by production systems, sustained adoption, and meaningful customer impact – not simply activity or successful demonstrations. This is a rare opportunity to work on consequential real-world deployments at the frontier of AI while directly influencing how OpenAI’s products evolve.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Deeply embed with our most sophisticated and technical platform customers, serving as their technical thought partner in ideating and building novel applications on our API.
• Forge relationships with CTOs, AI Product and engineering leaders to ensure their application’s successful deployment at scale.
• Proactively provide guidance to our customers on how to maximize business impact from their applications, accelerating their time to value.
• Build targeted prototypes, pilots, and model evaluations with customer teams to test product ideas, guide architecture decisions, and inform their product roadmaps.
• Collaborate with our Product and Research teams in validating upcoming frontier AI capabilities in customer environments, and deliver high-signal feedback to steer OpenAI’s roadmap.
• Scale the Applied AI Engineer function through sharing knowledge and publishing best-practices to our internal and external repositories.
• Evaluate emerging model capabilities, developer tools, and implementation patterns, and translate relevant advances into practical recommendations for customer applications.
• Work alongside customer teams through on-site workshops and implementation sessions, helping resolve technical challenges and strengthen relationships. This includes occasional travel.

📌 Required Qualifications

• Bring 8+ years of deep, hands-on technical experience and an eagerness to work closely with customers. Our team consists of former startup founders, software and ML engineers, technical product managers and solution architects.
• Have a track record of personally leading complex, production-scale AI/ML systems from ambiguous discovery through production deployment, adoption, and measurable business impact.
• Are passionate about being on the forefront of the latest AI industry trends, incl. agent architecture patterns, advanced prompt and context engineering, evaluation frameworks, safety, and security.
• Are proficient in Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, or similar languages and are comfortable with cloud infrastructure.

🎁 Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
401(k) retirement plan with employer match
Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
Mental health and wellness support
Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
Relocation support for eligible employees
Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.