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Software Engineer, Safety Engineering

OpenAI, San Francisco

Posted pay

$207K–$385K

a year

Location: San Francisco
Work type: Hybrid
Level: Not given
Experience: 5+ years
Skills in the job text: Python
React
PostgreSQL
JavaScript
MySQL
Posted: Aug 31, 2026
Last check: 5 h ago
Job type: Software engineering

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OpenAI

About OpenAI: funding, hiring and pay

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The role

We’re looking for a self-starter engineer who loves building products in an iterative, fast-moving environment—especially internal tools that unlock real-world impact. In this role, you’ll build full-stack tooling for our Safety Systems teams that directly improves the safety and reliability of OpenAI’s models, including in sensitive areas like mental health and other vulnerable-user protections. Your work will increase the team’s velocity in identifying and fixing safety issues and help tighten the feedback loop between policy, data, and the model training cycle.

The team

The Safety Systems org https://openai.com/safety/safety-systems is responsible for various safety work to ensure our best models can be safely deployed to the real world to benefit the society and is at the forefront of OpenAI's mission to build and deploy safe AGI, driving our commitment to AI safety and fostering a culture of trust and transparency.

The Safety Engineering team builds the platforms and tools that make OpenAI’s models safe to use in the real world. We partner closely with researchers, product teams, and policy to turn safety ideas into reliable, scalable systems: measuring risk, enforcing safeguards, and continuously improving how models behave in production. Our work sits at the intersection of product engineering, data, and AI, and directly shapes how millions of people experience OpenAI’s technology.

What you will do

Own the end-to-end development of internal tools that help improve the safety of OpenAI’s models (with a focus on areas like mental health and other vulnerable-user protections)
Partner closely with Safety Systems researchers, engineers, and model policy creators to understand workflows, pain points, and requirements—and translate them into durable product solutions
Build full-stack experiences to support core model policy workflows, such as labeling and inspecting data, analyzing and reviewing failure cases, and surfacing insights for iteration
Optimize internal applications for usability, speed, and scale to increase team velocity and reduce time-to-fix for safety issues
Transform successful AI assisted safety workflows into external facing safety products, that empowers developers to build safer AI, uplift the industry standard for AI safety, and prepare the world for more capable AGI.

What you need

Have 5+ years of relevant engineering experience at tech and product-driven companies
Are proficient with JavaScript, React, and other web technologies
Are proficient with at least one backend language (we use Python)
Have experience with relational databases like Postgres/MySQL
Have an interest in AI/ML (direct experience not required)
Are excited to partner closely with researchers and policy writers to ship tools that directly improve the safety of OpenAI’s models

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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf

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.

Legal notes

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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.

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.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241.

Read the job posting on the OpenAI site

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Source: the OpenAI Ashby job board. We last checked this job 5 h ago. We first saw it 4 days ago. A job on a job board does not always mean that the team interviews people now.

Company facts

Money raised: $51.3BSum of funding rounds on record
Newest round: Funding roundMar 31, 2025

Funding records can have errors and can be missing. The company page has the links.

OpenAI

Open tech jobs: 424
With posted pay: 90%
Median posted base: $266K–$405K

About OpenAI: funding, hiring and pay

Compared with similar jobs

This base pay is above the median for software engineering jobs in the Bay Area with no level in the job title.

Median: $196K a year
Other jobs in the group: 2,092

We compare the middle of each posted range. This is base pay as posted. The group does not include this job.