System Software Engineer, Applied Foundations

System Software Engineer, Applied Foundations

Applied AI Engineering - San Francisco

OpenAI Careers

The Applied Foundations team at OpenAI is dedicated to ensuring that our cutting-edge technology is not only revolutionary but also secure from a myriad of adversarial threats. We strive to maintain the integrity of our platforms as they scale.

The Applied Foundations team is at the front lines of defending against financial abuse, scaled attacks, and other forms of misuse that could undermine the user experience or harm our operational stability.

At OpenAI, our mission is to advance AI in a way that is safe, reliable, and aligned with broad societal values. We are seeking a Software Engineer who will work at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems and security infrastructure. In this role you will build, scale, and defend critical backend services: powering training infrastructure at scale and protecting the platform from misuse, adversarial behavior, and systemic abuse.

Your work will ensure both performance, reliability, and safety across our systems.

• 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.

• Have at least 5 years of software engineering experience working on distributed systems, platforms, or infrastructure.
• Love figuring out how systems work and continuously come up with ideas for how to make them faster while minimizing complexity and maintenance burden.
• Are 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.

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…