Software Engineer, Applied Evals

About the team
Applied Evals defines what good looks like for safe, advanced AI systems. We turn complex, high-value workflows into clear, reproducible signals that guide model training and product quality. Our work bridges frontier customers and models, ensuring improvements show up where users experience them. We combine hands-on, unscalable efforts with systems that others can extend, creating a compounding loop of model improvement.

About the Role

We’re hiring product-minded engineers to design and build evals and harnesses that capture real-world quality for advanced AI systems. You’ll own the loop from prototyping with users to building reliable pipelines and integrating signals into training stacks. This role sits at the center of model improvement. The systems you design will directly shape how models behave, accelerate their reliability, and raise the standard for what customers expect.

You’ll collaborate closely with research and product teams and work across the stack, from backend pipelines to user-facing interfaces. The work includes evaluating multi-turn and tool-using systems, designing agent harnesses, and applying reinforcement learning and related methods in production settings. Engineers who succeed in this role bring both a builder’s mindset and the judgment to create reusable systems that others can build on. Many thrive here by operating like founders or founding engineers, taking initiative, moving quickly, and creating structure where none exists.

This role is based in our San Francisco HQ. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance.

In this role, you will:

• Define the core evaluation signals that drive model improvement at OpenAI, turning vague product gaps into crisp, defensible measures of quality

• Design agents, harnesses, and eval pipelines that are reliable, reproducible, and extendable

• Prototype solutions with real workflows and convert them into scalable feedback loops

• Connect evaluation signals directly to research and training systems so product improvements show up in what users experience

• Shape model interaction paradigms by partnering with engineering, research, and product teams on how models are deployed and measured

• Build reusable systems and tools that enable contributions from across the company and steadily raise the quality bar

You’ll thrive in this role if you:

• Bring 4+ years of experience in software engineering with strong fundamentals and a track record of shipping production systems end-to-end

• Have experience building AI agents or applications, including designing evals and improving performance through prompting or scaffolding

• Are familiar with evaluation methods for LLMs and have worked with patterns like multi-agent workflows, tool use, or long context.

• Are familiar with deep learning concepts or have prior exposure to training models.

• Communicate clearly across technical and non-technical audiences across levels

• Are motivated by high-impact collaboration with research and product teams and thrive in ambiguity

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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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.