Principal Software Engineer, Full Stack — Codex

• Set the technical and product direction for significant areas of Codex, translating an evolving product vision into scalable architectures and an actionable engineering strategy.

• Lead complex, multi-quarter initiatives spanning client applications, backend services, agent systems, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling.

• Design AI-powered workflows that generalize across languages, codebases, development environments, and organizations while remaining intuitive, reliable, and safe.

• Make high-consequence architectural decisions under ambiguity, balancing rapid product learning with long-term system quality and adaptability.

• Identify opportunities that cut across existing team or product boundaries, align stakeholders around a direction, and drive the work from exploration through launch and iteration.

• Partner closely with product, design, research, infrastructure, security, and go-to-market teams to turn emerging model capabilities and developer needs into coherent product experiences.

• Work directly with developers, open-source maintainers, startups, and large enterprises to uncover unmet needs and distinguish foundational opportunities from incremental improvements.

• Establish patterns and standards for reliability, observability, performance, experimentation, and evaluation across AI-powered developer workflows.

• Serve as a technical multiplier by reviewing critical designs, mentoring engineers, improving engineering practices, and helping the team navigate its hardest product and technical decisions.

• Contribute directly to implementation, particularly where the problem is novel, technically demanding, or requires connecting multiple layers of the product.

• Have led the design and delivery of technically complex, user-facing systems with impact extending beyond a single feature or team.

• Combine deep software-engineering expertise with exceptional product judgment and can move fluently across product interfaces, distributed systems, infrastructure, and developer tooling.

• Have a track record of creating clarity in ambiguous problem spaces, setting a compelling technical direction, and bringing multiple teams or disciplines along with you.

• Remain hands-on while increasing the effectiveness of other engineers through architecture, mentorship, decision-making, and technical leadership.

• Understand modern software-development workflows deeply and can recognize where AI agents require fundamentally new interaction and system designs.

• Have experience building or operating AI-powered products and understand the challenges created by nondeterminism, evaluation, latency, reliability, safety, and rapidly evolving model capabilities.

• Make thoughtful tradeoffs between speed, product learning, technical quality, and long-term leverage.

• Develop strong perspectives from user evidence while remaining willing to revise those perspectives as technology and user behavior evolve.

• Communicate clearly across engineering, product, design, research, and executive audiences, especially when decisions involve substantial uncertainty or organizational complexity.

• Are energized by defining a problem as much as solving it—and by creating the technical and organizational conditions for others to deliver excellent work.

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. 

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