Fullstack Engineer, Safety Engineering
OpenAI
Location
San Francisco
Employment Type
Full time
Department
Safety Systems
Compensation
- Base Salary $210K – $325K
The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.
Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
401(k) retirement plan with employer match
Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
Mental health and wellness support
Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
Relocation support for eligible employees
Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.
More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.
This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.
About the Team
The Safety Systems org 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.
About 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.
In this role, you will:
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.
You might thrive in this role if you:
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.
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.
Compensation Range: $210K - $325K