Applied AI Engineer - Startups, Codex

About the team

The Applied AI Engineering team works closely with frontier startups. We are trusted advisors to, and thought partners with, startups to ensure that OpenAI’s technology is deployed safely and effectively, whilst also partnering with engineering, research, and product to turn those insights into evaluation systems, product improvements, and better model behavior.

This team sits at the intersection of customer reality and model quality. We combine hands-on technical depth with strong product judgment, helping translate complex, high-value use cases into clear signals that can improve both the customer experience and the underlying systems.

About the Role

As an Applied AI Engineer focused on Codex for startups, you will help developers and founders transform how they build and ship software. You’ll combine hands-on engineering, startup experience, and compelling technical communication to help teams turn the potential of AI coding tools into practical, effective workflows.

Presentations and community engagement are central to this role. You will engage developers and founders through technical talks, live demos, workshops, and programmes across the startup ecosystem, alongside targeted work with individual customers. You’ll build reusable tools and resources that extend your impact, and bring insights from developers back to OpenAI’s Product, Research, and Engineering teams.

This role is well suited to someone who enjoys both hands-on building and sharing what they learn with others. You should be as excited to lead a room of developers, deliver an engaging presentation, and build relationships across the startup community as you are to explore a technical problem in code—with a focus on sustained adoption and meaningful improvements in how startups work.

In this role, you will:

• Partner with top startups to identify where Codex can have the greatest impact on how their teams build and ship software.

• Design and lead technical talks, live demos, workshops, hackathons, and repeatable hands-on programmes that turn initial interest into sustained adoption.

• Work directly with selected customers to build Codex workflows, integrations, and automations, resolve technical blockers, and evaluate effectiveness and reliability.

• Turn successful approaches into reusable code examples, guides, and tools that help more startups succeed with Codex and OpenAI’s broader platform.

• Collaborate with account teams, developer experience, and ecosystem partners to reach developers and founders, prioritise opportunities, and drive measurable customer value.

• Translate customer experiences and developer feedback into actionable insights for OpenAI’s Product, Research, and Engineering teams.

You’ll thrive in this role if you:

• Have experience building at, founding, or working closely with early-stage startups, and understand the pace, ambiguity, and practical trade-offs involved.

• Bring strong software engineering fundamentals and enjoy building practical AI applications, integrations, and developer tools.

• Are an active user of Codex or other AI coding tools, with a thoughtful perspective on how they can improve software development.

• Are a compelling communicator who enjoys presenting, delivering live demos, and leading hands-on workshops for developers and founders.

• Have a talent for turning complex technical ideas into clear explanations, engaging examples, and reusable resources that help others succeed.

• Combine developer empathy with sound technical judgment: you can uncover what a team needs, troubleshoot problems, and help them adopt effective, reliable workflows.

• Bring high agency, curiosity, and end-to-end ownership, working independently while collaborating closely with colleagues and ecosystem partners.

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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