Software Engineer, Codex Cloud

OpenAI

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Research Services 👥 201 employees 📍 San Francisco, CA, US Est. 2015

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with…

Job Overview

We're building an AI software engineer. One that you can pair with, delegate to, or even ask to take on future tasks proactively. Our team is a fast-moving group within OpenAI, bringing together research, engineering, design, and product. We iteratively build the Codex agent harness and product to get the most out of the model, and we iteratively train the model to be great at complex software engineering tasks.

About the Team

The Codex team is responsible for building state-of-the-art AI systems that can write code, reason about software, and act as intelligent agents for developers and non-developers alike. We operate across research, engineering, product, and infrastructure; owning the full lifecycle of experimentation, deployment, and iteration on novel coding capabilities.

Codex Cloud builds cloud-first software engineering products and the supporting platform capabilities to power agentic experiences across OpenAI. It is a cross-cutting team that works across the stack to build both delightful product experiences and fundamental platform capabilities.

About the Role

Codex Cloud owns cloud-based agentic experiences like code review and cloud tasks (with many more on the way), but also the underlying runtime/orchestration layer for cloud-based agentic tasks. That runtime is the execution and infrastructure layer that turns Codex from a code generator into a real AI software engineer operating at scale. It provides secure, sandboxed environments where Codex can run commands, read and write files, execute tests, and iteratively improve its work across real codebases — just like a human developer. More broadly, Codex Runtime is the distributed systems substrate that enables large numbers of supervised AI agents to run inside OpenAI’s and customers’ data centers, tackling increasingly complex goals over long time horizons. By giving agents a real working context and reliable execution environment, Codex Runtime makes it possible for Codex to validate its own changes, debug failures, and deliver production-ready results, defining how AI agents safely, reliably, and at scale interact with the world’s software.

Key Responsibilities

• Shape the evolution of Codex itself by identifying how teams actually use (and break) AI-powered software engineering, and driving changes across product, infrastructure, and model behavior to make Codex a truly reliable teammate for organizations.


• Design customer-facing (across consumer and enterprise segments) software engineering experiences end-to-end to automate and empower engineers to safely build and deliver software to their customers.


• Build the core team and enterprise primitives that make Codex usable at scale including container orchestration, virtual machine provisioning/configuration, execution sandboxes, shared block storage, RBAC, admin and audit surfaces, usage, rate limits and pricing controls, managed configuration and constraints, and analytics that give teams and operators deep visibility into how Codex is being used.


• Design and own secure, observable, full-stack systems that power Codex across web, IDEs, CLI, and CI/CD, integrating with enterprise identity and governance systems (SSO/SAML/OIDC, SCIM, policy enforcement) and building data-access patterns that are performant, compliant, and trustworthy.


• Lead real-world deployments and launches by working directly with customers and GTM to roll Codex out across teams, using live usage and operational signals to rapidly iterate and turn messy, real-world feedback into scalable product and platform improvements.

What You Might Thrive In

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have strong software engineering fundamentals and experience turning ideas into production-grade large-scale distributed systems, thinking holistically about balancing speed, performance, costs, and user experience.


• Have been using AI-powered/agentic software development tools and are familiar with their strengths/weaknesses.


• Have experience with orchestration and distributed systems.

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.