Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This iOS Engineer role sits in the foundational layer of a consumer and developer SaaS product suite, where mobile is a primary surface for identity, access, trust, and monetization. Work centered on account management, safety, and commerce reflects the realities of modern subscription software, where reliability and user confidence are product features in their own right. The remit also signals a platform mindset, building shared client capabilities that multiple applications can depend on.
For a SaaS career, the most durable learning here comes from owning cross cutting systems that translate directly across companies: authentication flows, payments, state management, observability, and performance tuning under real usage. Designing reusable iOS primitives and testing frameworks builds experience in internal platform engineering, a discipline increasingly important as SaaS portfolios expand across apps and teams. Close collaboration with backend, product, and safety partners also mirrors how SaaS organizations ship features without compromising security or compliance.
This role tends to suit engineers who enjoy deep ownership of core mobile infrastructure alongside polished user experiences. It aligns with professionals who prefer architectural tradeoffs, long horizon maintainability, and careful execution on business critical paths like billing and trust. It is also a strong match for those motivated by work that other product teams build on top of.
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
OpenAI’s Applications Engineering organization builds and operates the products that bring our cutting-edge research to millions of users and developers worldwide. The Applied Foundations team owns the core product and platform layers that make those experiences possible — from identity & access, to safety to payments & commerce across all of our apps. Our teams span product engineering, infrastructure, and safety, working together to deliver technology that is reliable, secure, and trusted at global scale.
About the Role
You will be a Senior iOS engineer on OpenAI’s Applied Foundations team, building the core mobile experiences that power how users sign up, manage their account, family features, pay for services, stay safe, and interact with OpenAI’s products with confidence. This role is about creating high-quality products as well as reusable iOS foundations that product teams across different OpenAI apps depend on to ship quickly while meeting the highest standards for security, reliability, and user trust. You’ll own complex client-side systems spanning UI, networking, local state, payment integrations and Apple platform integrations, and work closely with backend, product, and safety partners to shape the architecture that supports OpenAI’s mobile ecosystem at global scale.
In this role, you will:
Build and ship new experiences on iOS that showcase the power of AI.
Optimize app performance, reliability, and responsiveness at global scale.
Design and maintain shared iOS frameworks and primitives for account, trust, and commerce flows that are used across OpenAI’s mobile apps.
Establish robust testing frameworks and refine app architecture for long-term maintainability.
Collaborate with product, design, research, and backend teams to deliver high-impact features.
Provide technical leadership to shape the future of OpenAI’s iOS platform.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have 4+ years of professional software engineering experience.
Have a proven track record of building high-quality iOS applications in production, especially for systems that need to be reliable and resilient at scale.
Have owned complex, business-critical mobile systems end-to-end.
Have experience making deep architectural tradeoffs on iOS.
Are fluent in Swift and familiar with the Apple development ecosystem (Xcode, UIKit, SwiftUI).
Care deeply about performance, security, and user experience.
Enjoy working cross-functionally to bring ambitious product ideas to life.
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.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
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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.
