O

OpenAI

Builds AI models and the ChatGPT assistant

Backend Software Engineer - Cooperative AI, Evals

Full-TimeUpdated
$266k - $445k/yr
Mid
Seattle, WA, USA+1 moreMore locations: San Francisco, CA, USA
In Person
Software EngineeringBackend Engineering

About the job

Requirements
  • Have at least 4 years of backend engineering experience at product-driven companies, excluding internships.
  • Be proficient in backend technologies; the listed technology stack includes Python, FastAPI, and Postgres.
  • Have experience designing and scaling distributed systems, APIs, or data processing pipelines.
  • Have experience building AI agents or applications, including designing evaluations and improving performance through prompting or scaffolding.
  • Be familiar with evaluation methods for large language models and have worked with patterns such as multi-agent workflows, tool use, or long context.
  • Have experience creating production evaluations and/or measuring machine learning or large language model performance at scale.
Responsibilities
  • Design evaluation pipelines that are reliable, reproducible, and extendable.
  • Build infrastructure for continuous evaluation monitoring frameworks, including regression and drift monitoring and robust golden datasets, along with feedback loops that strengthen support automation.
  • 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 downstream systems and artificial intelligence workflows.
  • Collaborate with data, 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.

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)

Growth & Insights and Company News

6 month growth

5%

1 year growth

0%

2 year growth

1%
Yahoo Finance
Oct 29th, 2026
OpenAI reportedly to buy Google's AI chips, a $75B TPU business bet by 2027

OpenAI is reportedly preparing to buy AI chips from Google, a major Nvidia rival, according to Reuters, citing The Information. It began renting Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) in 2025. Google says its latest TPU 8i, built for inference, delivers up to 80% better performance per dollar than the previous Ironwood generation. That does not mean it costs 80% less than Nvidia's chips. Cheaper computing may not lower the $20 ChatGPT Plus price. OpenAI could instead raise usage limits or offer stronger models. Evercore ISI believes Google's external TPU business could generate $75 billion in 2027 and $113 billion in 2028. Anthropic and Oracle are already customers.

Yahoo Finance
Oct 29th, 2026
Eisman warns AI giants have "no moats" as Morningstar sees $57B compute cost edge

Investor Steve Eisman, known from "The Big Short," says the AI boom depends on the health of OpenAI and Anthropic. He told CNBC that cheaper rival models could force the two labs to cut prices, threatening their heavy spending on computing power and exposing chipmakers and cloud providers. Morningstar disagrees. It estimates that bulk, multiyear deals could secure Nvidia B200 capacity at $2.25 per GPU-hour, against a $16.11 hyperscaler list price. For a gigawatt of computing power, that is roughly $9 billion a year instead of $66 billion, an illustrative $57 billion saving. Customers are shopping around, though. Anthropic's share of spending through Vercel's AI Gateway fell to 44% in September from 64% a month earlier. Anthropic's IPO filing showed $11.56 billion in second-quarter revenue and $974 million in operating profit.

Kalkine Media
Oct 29th, 2026
Eightco subsidiary sells part of indirect OpenAI stake for $20M

Eightco Holdings Inc. said its subsidiary, AI Innovation Capital LLC, sold part of its indirect stake in OpenAI Group, PBC for about $20 million in gross cash proceeds. The sale closed on October 26, 2026, according to a Form 8-K filing made on October 29, 2026. The stake is held through a single purpose vehicle. An unnamed third party bought the shares. Eightco did not say what share of its interest it sold or how much it still holds. The company also issued a press release on October 29, 2026, with an operations update.

TechCrunch
Oct 28th, 2026
Microsoft booked $10B in OpenAI revenue last quarter, nearly 11% of its total

Microsoft generated $10 billion in revenue from commercial arrangements with OpenAI, including revenue-sharing payments, in the quarter ended September 30, it said in a regulatory filing on Wednesday. That is nearly 11% of its total quarterly revenue of $92.3 billion. For the 2026 fiscal year, OpenAI-related revenue hit $24.1 billion. Microsoft also reported $7.2 billion in outstanding receivables from OpenAI, up from $6 billion at the end of June. The ties are loosening. Under an April 2026 agreement, OpenAI must keep sharing revenue with Microsoft through 2030, subject to a cap, while it may work with rival cloud providers. Microsoft's stake in OpenAI fell from about 25% in June to 24% in September.

Yahoo Finance
Oct 28th, 2026
NxtGen becomes OpenAI Select Partner, plans SpeedCode coding agent for Indian enterprises

NxtGen, an Indian provider of cloud, AI infrastructure and managed services, has been named an OpenAI Select Partner within the OpenAI Partner Network. The Bengaluru company announced the news on October 28, 2026. NxtGen will help Indian enterprises build, deploy and scale AI solutions, with a focus on architecture, security, access controls, auditability and local operating support. Chief executive officer A S Rajgopal said Indian firms need advanced AI together with governance and accountability. NxtGen also plans to launch SpeedCode, a coding agent built on the open-source Codex CLI and OpenAI models via API. A controlled pilot will let customers assess accepted engineering work, completion time, quality and cost before wider adoption.

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