Full-Stack Software Engineer, Frontier Exploration

About the Team

OpenAI Labs explores the edges of what’s possible with AI. We start from the latest breakthroughs – or overlooked research with untapped potential – and expand their capabilities by prototyping entirely new ways for people to benefit from AI.

About the Role

As a Full-Stack Software Engineer on the Labs team, you will create new ways for people to interact with AI.

Your work will begin as rapid internal experiments: prototypes built to explore surprising capabilities or novel interfaces. Some will spark entirely new products or research directions, shaping how millions of people experience AI. Across projects, you’ll ship these ideas internally, learn from how people use them, and – if they prove promising – hand them off to product teams to take forward before moving on to the next frontier.

Sometimes you’ll start by playing with a researcher’s early demo, identify emerging behaviors, and push on them in collaboration with researchers. Other times, you’ll start from a capability that hasn’t yet been fully explored and design a novel interface around it.

We’re looking for creative people who love to tinker and explore, chasing sparks of magic and shaping them into experiences that help the world go further and discover new possibilities.

Location

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Explore emerging capabilities and collaborate with researchers to uncover surprising new behaviors – whether from the model itself or from how people respond – and push their limits through creative experimentation.

• Design and prototype new interfaces and interaction patterns that rethink how people experience AI, making powerful capabilities feel intuitive, delightful, and inspiring.

• Bring ideas to life quickly, turning concepts into working demos – and evolving those prototypes into robust, testable experiences ready for real-world feedback.

• Ship early, learn from real usage, and iterate fast – refining ideas based on how people actually use them.

• Hand off the most promising prototypes to product teams to scale before moving on to the next frontier.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have demonstrated experience building and shipping full-stack applications, from intuitive interfaces to reliable backend systems.

• Build things for fun and care deeply about craft: curiosity drives you, and creating is how you explore ideas.

• Are energized by ambiguity and excited to turn novel capabilities into tangible, working experiences.

• Have a refined product taste and intuition for what great interactions should feel like.

• Care about how ideas work in people’s hands and evolve through real use.

• Value iteration as much as invention; refining is part of the creative process.

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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.