Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This backend engineering role sits at the core of a widely adopted AI product that behaves like a SaaS platform at global scale. Work spanning infrastructure, personalization, ecosystems, and growth signals an environment where backend services are tightly coupled to product outcomes, reliability, and developer-facing APIs. For SaaS professionals, that combination reflects the realities of modern subscription software where platform capabilities and user experience are mediated through resilient systems.
From a career-building standpoint, the role offers durable SaaS leverage: designing services that must remain performant under variable demand, operating distributed systems with clear uptime and security expectations, and collaborating across product, data, and frontend to ship end-to-end improvements. Experience in these areas transfers well across SaaS companies that rely on multi-service architectures, instrumentation, and iterative product delivery.
This role is best suited to engineers who prefer foundational work over feature-only delivery, and who take ownership of operational quality as part of engineering craft. It fits professionals who want their technical decisions to influence scaling, reliability, and platform evolution, and who are comfortable working at the intersection of infrastructure and product priorities within a large, complex SaaS-like surface area.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the Team
Core backend engineering is central to delivering reliable, scalable, and performant AI-driven products. Our Backend teams span Search Infrastructure, Platform Engineering, Personalization, Ecosystems, Growth, and more—building services, data systems, and APIs that power ChatGPT’s global footprint.
About the Role
We’re hiring Backend Software Engineers to design and implement the services and infrastructure powering ChatGPT.
What You’ll Do
Architect, build, and improve scalable backend systems and APIs.
Drive performance, reliability, and security across distributed services.
Work closely with product, data science, and frontend teams.
Implement data storage, retrieval, compute, and integration solutions.
Participate in long-term architectural planning and technical design reviews.
You Might Thrive Here If You:
Have strong experience with distributed systems, APIs, and backend languages (e.g., Go, Python, Rust, C++).
Enjoy building resilient services that handle large scale and complexity.
Are passionate about system design, reliability, and operational excellence.
We are open to hiring in San Fransisco, New York and Seattle
About OpenAI
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 assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
