Software Engineer, OpenAI Presence

Compensation: $230K - $385K per year

About the Team

OpenAI Presence, part of Enterprise Engineering, builds a platform for reliable AI agents that carry out high-volume business workflows. We focus on specific use cases such as customer support, sales, and insurance claims, helping organizations put agents to work in production.

The Presence platform supports the agent development lifecycle, including evaluation, deployment, and improvement through real interactions. It connects agents to company systems and supports voice and chat experiences, with policies, guardrails, and human handoffs to help businesses stay in control. Read the launch announcement Introducing OpenAI Presence.

About the Role

We’re looking for an engineer to help shape the foundations of Presence and build the systems that make AI agents dependable in everyday business operations. You’ll help set the platform’s technical direction while staying close to the code, taking architecture from early decisions through to systems that perform reliably at scale.

You’ll bring deep backend expertise and the product judgment to connect what we build with how businesses use it. The work centers on the services that power Presence and extends across the stack—giving you scope to shape both the underlying systems and the experiences they enable.

In this role, you will:

• Provide hands-on technical leadership, guiding architectural decisions and implementation across the Presence platform.
• Design and build backend systems for reliable, high-volume agent workflows in support, sales, and other enterprise use cases.
• Develop platform capabilities that support agent development and learning from real-world use.
• Identify and address reliability bottlenecks as agent workflows become more complex and usage grows.
• Work across backend infrastructure and product experiences as needed, collaborating with other engineers to turn evolving requirements into working software.

Your background might look something like:

• 9+ years of professional engineering experience, excluding internships, in backend, platform, or product engineering roles.
• A track record of hands-on technical leadership, including setting architecture, breaking complex problems into clear implementation plans, and guiding engineers through delivery.
• Deep backend engineering and systems design skills, with proficiency in at least one backend programming language and experience designing services, data models, and interfaces that remain reliable as usage grows.
• End-to-end ownership of complex systems or product capabilities, from ambiguous requirements and technical design through implementation, launch, and production iteration.
• Strong production engineering judgment: you can diagnose difficult failures, reason about performance and scalability, and improve reliability through testing, observability, and operational discipline.
• Strong product judgment that connects technical decisions to user needs, with the ability to balance delivery speed, reliability, security, and long-term maintainability.
• The ability to move between backend infrastructure and product experiences, contribute across the stack when needed, and quickly learn unfamiliar systems, tools, and domains.
• Clear technical communication and effective collaboration across disciplines, including explaining trade-offs, creating alignment, and driving complex work forward while remaining hands-on.
• Experience with AI agents, enterprise workflows, integrations, or agent development and evaluation is a plus, but not required.

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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