Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This backend engineering role sits at an intersection that is increasingly central in SaaS: turning AI capabilities into dependable internal platforms that support customer-facing operations. The focus on knowledge systems, automation, and agent-like workflows reflects a mature SaaS pattern where product leverage comes from better internal tooling as much as external features. Being embedded close to real operational stakeholders also signals work grounded in production constraints rather than prototypes.
For a long-term SaaS career, the value here is in building durable primitives that can be reused across domains, a skill that transfers across platform, infrastructure, and product engineering tracks. The remit spans APIs, data structuring, and distributed systems, which maps closely to how modern SaaS companies scale reliability and iteration speed. Exposure to integrating model outputs into workflows also builds practical judgment around observability, failure modes, and maintainability in AI-adjacent systems.
This role fits engineers who prefer owning systems end to end and making tradeoffs that balance iteration with long-term architecture. It will suit someone comfortable collaborating across product and research interfaces while keeping a strong backend engineering center of gravity. Candidates motivated by internal platform impact and measurable operational outcomes are likely to find the scope aligned.
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
The Cooperative AI team is scaling OpenAI with OpenAI. We are building a model powered knowledge system that evolves and learns as our products, systems and customers evolve. We leverage our state of the art models, technologies, and products (some external, some still in the lab) to assist or completely automate robust operations supporting both internal and external customers. We support OpenAI customers and internal partners globally, powering systems from customer support to integrity to product insights. We are a self-contained multi-disciplinary team, who enjoy a lightning fast feedback loop with customers at scale, some of whom sit just a few pods away. We iterate fast, and engineer for reliable long-term impact. We're constantly looking for the similarities and patterns in different types of work, and focus on building simple primitives, to apply world class knowledge to many domains.
The work of this team exemplifies use of OpenAI technologies. We build systems so everyone can see the leverage that is possible with well designed AI-based implementations. We do this by working through internal use cases focused on Customers (specifically knowledge systems, automation systems, and automated agent systems) to prove impact, then we scale.
About the Role
We’re looking for a Backend Software Engineer to help architect and scale the infrastructure that powers our knowledge systems. This is a deeply technical and highly cross-functional role where you’ll build robust systems and backend services that serve as the foundation for how knowledge is created, accessed, and applied across OpenAI.
In this role, you will:
Design, build, and maintain backend services and APIs to support intelligent automation and knowledge systems
Integrate and structure data across internal platforms, transforming it into formats optimized for use by downstream systems and AI workflows.
Collaborate closely with product, research, and engineering teams to integrate OpenAI models into high-leverage workflows
Own the full development lifecycle of new backend systems and internal platform capabilities
Build with scale and maintainability in mind, while rapidly iterating on new ideas
You might be a great fit if you have:
4+ years of backend engineering experience at product-driven companies (excluding internships)
Proficiency in backend technologies. Our tech stack includes Python, FastAPI, and Postgres
Experience designing and scaling distributed systems, APIs, or data processing pipelines
A pragmatic mindset. You’re comfortable shipping iteratively while building toward a long-term vision
An interest in structured knowledge representation, internal search, agent infrastructure, or systems that evolve over time
Curiosity about AI/ML and excitement to work alongside world-class research and product teams (hands-on experience is a bonus, not a must)
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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