OpenAI
Software Engineer, API Safety
$266K–$445K
San Francisco · Hybrid · Full-time · Posted Aug 21, 2026
- Experience
- 7+ years of professional experience, excluding internships.
About the job
Build APIs, dashboards, and scalable safeguards that help developers deploy frontier models safely across high-volume API traffic.
What you'll do
- Design and build safety-control APIs and customer-facing observability dashboards.
- Develop scalable safety systems and partner with Safety Research and Integrity to mitigate emerging risks.
- Own projects from design through launch and iteration, ensuring safeguard availability, latency, and scalability.
What they ask for
- 7+ years of professional experience, excluding internships, in backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering roles.
- Track record designing, building, and operating production backend services, developer-facing APIs, or distributed systems.
- Strong software engineering and systems fundamentals, including leading technically complex projects from ambiguous ideas to production.
- Proficiency in one or more general-purpose backend languages, such as Python, Go, Rust, or TypeScript.
Nice to have
- Experience with observability, abuse prevention, trust and safety, identity, security, privacy, compliance, or risk systems.
- Interest in helping frontier AI reach more developers and businesses responsibly.
Pay
$266K – $445K USD base salary
Tools
Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript
AI focus
Build safeguards and safety controls for responsible deployment of frontier models through the API, in partnership with Safety Research and Integrity.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative