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# product-minded backend engineer

- **Company:** OpenAI Inc.
- **Location:** United States
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Artificial Intelligence, Programming Tools, Software Engineering, Systems Integration, Backend, Data Pipelines
- **Published:** September 4, 2026
- **Apply:** https://startup.jobs/backend-software-engineer-gtm-innovation-openai-7170988

## About the Role

* Have 6+ years of experience as a software engineer working on applied AI or user-facing systems
 * Former founder, or early engineer at a startup who built a product from scratch is a plus
 * Domain experience or demonstrated interest in sales technology or enterprise knowledge work automation
 * Continually reinvent your software development process as coding models and developer tools improve
 * Take initiative, move quickly, and operate with a strong sense of ownership
 * Enjoy working closely with end users and shaping 0*1 products
 * Are collaborative, curious, and motivated to make an outsized impact at the frontier of AI

## Description

We're looking for a product-minded backend engineer to build the systems behind a new generation of AI coworkers: persistent agents that understand their environment, take on meaningful work, and improve over time.

You'll design and ship the foundational infrastructure that makes these agents effective in production, from durable workflow orchestration to long-running agent loops built on the Codex harness to the context, memory, tools, and permissions model they need to act reliably. You'll also build rigorous evaluation, observability, and feedback systems that make agent quality measurable and continuously improve how these systems perform.

This is a hands-on, high-ownership role at the intersection of agent infrastructure, applied AI, and product engineering. You'll work directly with go-to-market teams and collaborate across OpenAI's product and research organizations to turn ambiguous, real-world needs into dependable systems that help OpenAI meet the world at scale.

In this role, you will:

 * Build and scale durable agent runtimes, long-running agent loops, and workflow orchestration using the Codex harness and emerging agent infrastructure.
 * Design context and memory systems that ground agents in the information they need while preserving clear access boundaries.
 * Develop rigorous evaluation frameworks, production feedback loops, and observability to measure agent quality and improve it over time.
 * Partner directly with Sales, Technical Success, and Revenue Operations to identify high-value problems and own solutions from prototype through production.
 * Build reliable backend services, data pipelines, and integrations that enable agents to take meaningful action across real-world workflows.
 * Collaborate with OpenAI's Product and Research teams to advance agent capabilities and turn production learnings into platform improvements.


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