Principal Software Engineer - Productivity

About the Team

The Connector Ecosystem team builds the platform and product experiences that let people extend ChatGPT and Codex. We work on plugins, skills, connectors, interactive apps, and open standards like the Model Context Protocol (MCP). We make plugins easy to discover, install, and use, ensure they’re invoked at the right time, and help people find new ways to get value from them.

We want anyone to be able to turn a useful workflow into a plugin, share it, and have other people use it. A plugin can package instructions and skills with connections to the tools and data it needs. Our work spans creation and publishing, reliable execution across our products, clear permissions and approvals, and the controls admins need to bring plugins to their organizations. We work closely with research to improve tool quality as models evolve.

About the Role

We’re looking for a product-minded Principal Software Engineer to set technical direction, build the systems behind plugins, and improve how models use them. Depending on your focus, you may scale generalist infrastructure and identity-related integrations across products, improve plugin quality at the intersection of backend engineering and applied AI, or work on the product experience itself to drive plugin usage. You’ll lead complex initiatives across teams and own problems from diagnosis and design through implementation and release.

You’ll remain hands-on while driving product and design decisions alongside Product, Design, Research, and engineering partners. You’ll help shape what we build and how it works, translate user and developer needs into clear priorities, and guide technical decisions that balance rapid iteration with long-term reliability and maintainability.

This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In This Role, You Will

• Set technical direction and lead complex initiatives across the Plugin Ecosystem, aligning architecture and execution across teams.

• Drive product and design decisions with cross-functional partners, helping define priorities and shape intuitive experiences for users and developers.

• Design and ship APIs, SDKs, and services that developers use to extend ChatGPT and Codex.

• Build intuitive experiences that help users discover, install, and use plugins to get more done.

• Make plugins easier to create, test, publish, update, and share.

• Improve when and how models use plugins, from choosing the right plugin to completing a task. Work with Research to diagnose failures and measure improvements as models evolve.

• Improve plugin reliability and interaction quality across ChatGPT and Codex, including interactive apps, with clear error messages and recovery paths.

• Build consistent permissions, approvals, and admin controls that help individuals and organizations confidently adopt plugins.

• Work with developers and partners to turn recurring problems into improvements to the platform, tooling, and documentation.

• Collaborate across engineering, Product, Research, Security, and Trust & Safety to scale plugin infrastructure and deliver safe, reliable execution.

• Raise the engineering bar through mentorship, thoughtful code reviews, and clear technical guidance.

You Might Thrive in This Role If You

• Have 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of building and shipping products or platforms that people and developers rely on.

• Have led complex technical initiatives across teams and driven product and design decisions in close partnership with product managers and designers.

• Care about product quality and can make complex capabilities feel intuitive, from discovering a useful plugin to completing a task with it.

• Have strong opinions about APIs and abstractions, and can explain the tradeoffs behind your decisions. Experience with identity, permissions, or integration-heavy systems is especially valuable.

• Enjoy talking with users and developers, understanding what they’re trying to accomplish, and turning recurring problems into product and platform improvements.

• Can move between product questions and technical details, collaborate across teams, and take an ambiguous problem through to production.

• Are comfortable working across web interfaces and backend systems. Experience building applied AI systems, diagnosing model–tool interactions, and measuring reliability and quality is especially valuable.

• Have built products people rely on or software that other developers use, such as an API or SDK, an open-source project, a developer platform, or internal tools with real users.

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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