Principal Software Engineer, Enterprise Technology Vertical

OpenAIUSAFull Time2d ago

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Job description

About the role

This role is for an exceptionally experienced, hands-on full-stack engineer who will define and build the next generation of AI-powered enterprise workflows for the Technology vertical. You will own the hardest and most ambiguous problems, translating real customer needs into product direction, designing the underlying systems, and personally writing and shipping production-quality code across the entire stack. Your work will span ChatGPT Work surfaces, backend services, plugins, connectors, enterprise data, permissions, and evaluations, establishing patterns that other engineers will build upon for years. You will work closely with Design, Research, GTM, Security, and platform teams, as well as with customers and design partners, ensuring that people can reach a trustworthy first result, understand what the system did, and keep using the workflow. Success is measured not by prototype existence, but by reliable daily adoption where users understand the system and continue to derive value from it.

Key facts

Location: USA

Engagement: Full-time

What you'll do

Set the technical direction for role-specific enterprise AI experiences, and personally design, build, and ship their most critical components across ChatGPT Work surfaces, services, plugins, and connectors.
Turn ambiguous customer and design-partner needs into a clear, generalizable product and technical strategy, with explicit milestones, architectural decisions, and measurable quality and adoption goals.
Lead complex initiatives across Design, Research, GTM, Security, and platform teams; align senior stakeholders; make consequential tradeoffs; and drive decisions through to implementation.
Architect production-grade systems and establish the evaluation, instrumentation, security, reliability, staged-rollout, and rollback standards required to operate probabilistic AI experiences safely.
Own the complete product and engineering lifecycle: problem definition, technical design, hands-on prototyping, production implementation, launch, customer feedback, and sustained iteration.
Define durable technical contracts and fallback strategies across connectors, identity, permissions, enterprise data, model routing, and shared platform dependencies; raise the engineering bar through architecture reviews, mentorship, and reusable patterns.
You might thrive in this role if you are a deeply experienced, hands-on product engineer - typically with 10+ years building production software - who combines exceptional technical depth with strong product judgment.
You can independently architect and implement sophisticated systems across frontend, backend, APIs, data, distributed services, and complex enterprise integrations.
You can earn trust with customers, influence senior stakeholders, and bring cross-functional teams to a clear decision without relying on formal authority.
You know how to turn uncertainty into a disciplined execution plan, using experiments, evaluations, instrumentation, and customer evidence to decide what to build.
You treat enterprise identity, permissions, privacy, security, performance, reliability, and operational readiness as foundational product requirements.
You have repeatedly led the architecture and hands-on delivery of important user-facing products from ambiguous beginnings through production use, and can explain the technical and product decisions that made them succeed.
You know when to build quickly, when to invest in foundational systems, and how to turn a specific customer workflow into a durable product that serves many customers.
You will define and own the end-to-end delivery of products spanning ChatGPT Work surfaces, backend services, plugins, connectors, enterprise data, permissions, and evaluations.
You will establish patterns and reusable components that elevate the standard of engineering for the entire team.

Requirements

You are a deeply experienced, hands-on product engineer - typically with 10+ years building production software - who combines exceptional technical depth with strong product judgment.
You can independently architect and implement sophisticated systems across frontend, backend, APIs, data, distributed services, and complex enterprise integrations.
You can earn trust with customers, influence senior stakeholders, and bring cross-functional teams to a clear decision without relying on formal authority.
You know how to turn uncertainty into a disciplined execution plan, using experiments, evaluations, instrumentation, and customer evidence to decide what to build.
You treat enterprise identity, permissions, privacy, security, performance, reliability, and operational readiness as foundational product requirements.
You have repeatedly led the architecture and hands-on delivery of important user-facing products from ambiguous beginnings through production use, and can explain the technical and product decisions that made them succeed.
You know when to build quickly, when to invest in foundational systems, and how to turn a specific customer workflow into a durable product that serves many customers.
You are comfortable working directly with customers, setting direction with senior cross-functional and platform partners, debugging complex production behavior, and staying close to the code.

Nice to have

Extensive experience personally building and operating full-stack production products, including modern frontend technologies such as React and TypeScript and backend services in Python, with strong exposure to large language model applications and infrastructure.
Experience defining and operating reliable, low-latency LLM inference and routing systems that support enterprise workloads at scale.
Experience with enterprise identity and permissions systems, including SSO, SCIM, and authorization at scale.
Experience with connectors and plugin architectures for integrating with SaaS platforms and internal tools.
Experience with evaluation and instrumentation for AI systems, including prompt evaluation, response quality metrics, and automated testing in production.
Experience with staged rollout, canary releases, and automated rollback mechanisms for AI-driven services.
Familiarity with data and analytics platforms for usage telemetry, insights, and measurement of customer outcomes.
Experience mentoring engineers and establishing architectural review and design patterns.

Practical notes

Location: San Francisco