O

OpenAI

Builds AI models and the ChatGPT assistant

Full Stack Software Engineer

Full-Time
$347k - $385k/yr
Mid
San Francisco, CA, USA
Hybrid
Software EngineeringFull-Stack Engineering

About the job

Requirements
  • Experience building and shipping full-stack consumer products in production.
  • Comfort working in a modern frontend stack and building the APIs and services behind it.
  • Care deeply about product craftsmanship, performance, accessibility, and details that affect the user experience.
  • Understand API design, data modeling, system reliability, and the tradeoffs involved in evolving production systems.
  • Ability to move effectively between frontend, backend, and product decisions rather than remaining in a narrow implementation area.
  • Strong product judgment and ability to take a feature from a rough idea to a shipped, measurable outcome.
  • Ability to work in ambiguous, high-impact areas where the product and technical architecture are still taking shape.
  • Careful consideration of privacy, security, reliability, and user trust when working with sensitive data.
  • Enjoy diagnosing problems across system boundaries and improving underlying engineering foundations.
  • Interest in AI-native interfaces and new ways to make complex personal information easier to understand.
Responsibilities
  • Own full-stack product features from user experience and frontend implementation through backend services, data models, deployment, and observability.
  • Build polished, accessible, and performant interfaces for account connection, dashboards, insights, and conversational workflows.
  • Design APIs and backend systems that safely ingest, normalize, and serve financial data.
  • Build resilient integrations that handle synchronization, data freshness, partial failures, permissions, and user consent.
  • Bring new AI capabilities into production while prioritizing grounding, accuracy, transparency, and user control.
  • Establish architecture, performance standards, testing practices, and operational safeguards for a fast-growing product area.
  • Debug and improve complex behavior across client, server, infrastructure, and external integrations.
  • Use qualitative feedback, product metrics, and experiments to improve user outcomes without compromising clarity or trust.
  • Collaborate across disciplines to turn ambiguous product opportunities into simple, reliable experiences.
Desired Qualifications
  • Experience building backend services using languages and frameworks such as Python, Go, Node.js, or comparable technologies.
  • Experience with frontend development using React, TypeScript, Swift, or Kotlin.
  • Experience operating consumer products or distributed systems at scale.
  • Experience with fintech, personal finance, banking, payments, investing, or sensitive-data domains.
  • Familiarity with authentication, identity, permissions, privacy, and secure data flows.
  • Experience building dashboards, data visualizations, or insight-oriented products.
  • Familiarity with observability, experimentation, product metrics, and iterative development.
  • Experience with applied AI, conversational interfaces, or systems that incorporate model-generated output.

About the company

OpenAI researches and builds artificial intelligence models and turns them into products for people, developers, and businesses, with a stated mission of making sure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Its launch of ChatGPT in 2022 brought generative AI into everyday use. People use ChatGPT to ask questions, write, code, and analyze files, developers build OpenAI's models into their own apps through its API, and its Codex agent works through coding tasks on its own. OpenAI earns money from ChatGPT subscriptions, business plans, and API usage. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and others co-founded it in 2015; it is based in San Francisco and overseen by a nonprofit, the OpenAI Foundation.

Company Size

1,001-5,000

Company Stage

Late Stage VC

Total Funding

$226.5B

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Founded

2015

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Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Sales are compounding: OpenAI's yearly revenue pace doubled from $24 billion in March 2026 to nearly $50 billion in September.
  • Equity turns into cash regularly: staff sold $7 billion of shares in August 2026, after $6.6 billion in October 2025.
  • Room to grow: OpenAI plans to nearly double staff to 8,000 by year-end and listed 816 openings in October 2026.

What critics are saying

  • Its chief rival pulled ahead: Claude maker Anthropic's $965 billion valuation in May 2026 topped OpenAI's $852 billion.
  • Profits are years away: OpenAI's own forecast, reported in September 2026, shows $278 billion of cash burn through 2030.
  • Expect leadership churn: 15 senior leaders, including the revenue and applications chiefs, left OpenAI between January and September 2026.

What makes OpenAI unique

  • A nonprofit is in charge: the OpenAI Foundation appoints OpenAI's whole board and held a 26% stake in October 2025.
  • ChatGPT reaches about one in seven people on Earth: 1.2 billion used it each week as of September 2026.
  • Microsoft is a major part-owner: it held about 27% in October 2025 and licenses OpenAI's models through 2032.

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Benefits

Health insurance

Dental and vision insurance

Flexible spending account for healthcare and dependent care

Mental healthcare service

Fertility treatment coverage

401(k) with generous matching

20-week paid parental leave

Life insurance (complimentary)

AD&D insurance (complimentary)

Short-term/long-term disability insurance (complimentary)

Optional buy-up life insurance

Flexible work hours and unlimited paid time off (we encourage 4+ weeks per year)

Annual learning & development stipend

Regular team happy hours and outings

Daily catered lunch and dinner

Travel to domestic conferences

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

6%

1 year growth

1%

2 year growth

2%
Yahoo Finance
Oct 15th, 2026
BofA survey: ChatGPT tops Google Search as top pick for next-year ad budget growth, 26% to 19%

A Bank of America (BofA) survey of 117 advertisers and agencies suggests ChatGPT is starting to compete with Google for future ad budgets. In the poll, 26% named ChatGPT as the platform likely to gain the most ad spending over the next 12 months, ahead of Google Search at 19% and YouTube at 11%. Google still leads on current spending. Search was picked by 30% as the platform with the biggest rise in spend, and 33% said it was where AI was lifting ad returns fastest. Alphabet's Google Search and other revenue rose 17% to $63.27 billion in the second quarter. OpenAI said ChatGPT Ads passed $1 billion in annualised revenue run rate less than 200 days after launch. In the survey, 28% of respondents already advertise on ChatGPT, and 43% plan to start within 12 months.

Associated Press
Oct 14th, 2026
Infometry partners with OpenAI to bring advanced reasoning to enterprise data in Conversa

Infometry, a data analytics and AI company based in Silicon Valley, has partnered with OpenAI to bring OpenAI's models to its INFOFISCUS Conversa platform. The models are available now. Customers can connect their own OpenAI API credentials and use the models alongside other large and small language models. They can pick a model for each task based on reasoning complexity, performance, governance, and cost. Conversa queries data across enterprise and cloud platforms without copying it into a separate repository. Users can run root-cause analysis on changes in revenue, inventory, or forecasts, and ask follow-up questions in the same context. Infometry plans to deepen the integration as the partnership evolves.

Yahoo Finance
Oct 14th, 2026
OpenAI CFO warns on cheap Chinese AI models as revenue nears $50B

OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar has warned businesses against relying on cheaper Chinese AI models, saying some open-source systems can create cybersecurity risks for corporate networks. Speaking to Bloomberg Television, she said companies should favour Western AI software when protecting sensitive information. Anthropic executive Guillaume Princen made a similar point, noting that users can alter the code of open models. A Wharton School study found managers are split on who is responsible when workplace AI makes a serious error. In one example, a retail worker misconfigured a bot, which sent erroneous refund notices to 18,000 customers within hours. Friar added that US AI companies cannot afford to slow down. She said OpenAI reached nearly $50 billion in annualised revenue in the third quarter and expects roughly $70 billion by year-end.

Bloomberg
Oct 14th, 2026
OpenAI hires ex-xAI executive Uday Ruddarraju to lead data centre and compute units

OpenAI has named Uday Ruddarraju, a former xAI executive, to lead its infrastructure and compute businesses. The appointment is the latest leadership change among OpenAI's teams focused on expanding data center capacity.

Fox Business
Oct 13th, 2026
Saudi OpenAI engineer charged over hidden recording device in executive conference room

A Saudi national working as an OpenAI engineer has been arrested for allegedly planting a covert recording device in an executive conference room at the company's San Francisco office, federal authorities announced Tuesday. Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, was arrested October 9 and charged with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications. OpenAI found the encrypted device on September 30, plugged into a television's USB port and hidden in toilet paper. The room was used for highly confidential talks on research and product plans. Prosecutors said security footage showed Alfozan near the room several times without authorisation. A second device was later found in his bag. OpenAI said it found no sign that model weights, source code, or customer data were accessed. Alfozan has been fired. If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.