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OpenAI is hiring a Principal Software Engineer to define and build the next generation of AI-powered software development workflows for Codex. This is a highly product-oriented technical leadership role where "full stack" extends well beyond traditional frontend and backend to encompass user interfaces, developer tooling, workflow orchestration, agent and prompt design, backend systems, and cloud infrastructure.
You will set technical direction and lead major product initiatives, identifying the highest-leverage opportunities across the software development lifecycle. You'll translate ambiguous user and technical problems into durable product and system strategies, and lead execution across multiple engineers and partner teams. Your work will shape both Codex's architecture and how developers worldwide design, write, review, test, and maintain software.
Key responsibilities include:
- Setting technical and product direction for significant areas of Codex, translating product vision into scalable architectures and engineering strategy
- Leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives spanning client applications, backend services, agent systems, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling
- Designing AI-powered workflows that generalize across languages, codebases, development environments, and organizations while remaining intuitive, reliable, and safe
- Making high-consequence architectural decisions under ambiguity, balancing rapid product learning with long-term system quality
- Identifying cross-team opportunities, aligning stakeholders, and driving work from exploration through launch and iteration
- Partnering with product, design, research, infrastructure, security, and go-to-market teams to turn emerging model capabilities into coherent product experiences
- Working directly with developers, open-source maintainers, startups, and enterprises to uncover unmet needs
- Establishing patterns and standards for reliability, observability, performance, experimentation, and evaluation across AI-powered developer workflows
- Serving as a technical multiplier through design reviews, mentoring, improving engineering practices, and helping navigate hard decisions
- Contributing directly to implementation, especially on novel, technically demanding problems requiring cross-layer integration
You operate as a senior individual contributor, remaining deeply involved in design and implementation while raising the technical judgment, execution quality, and ambition of the broader team.
QUALIFICATIONS & REQUIREMENTS:
- Led design and delivery of technically complex, user-facing systems with impact extending beyond a single feature or team
- Deep software-engineering expertise combined with exceptional product judgment; ability to move fluently across product interfaces, distributed systems, infrastructure, and developer tooling
- Track record of creating clarity in ambiguous problem spaces, setting compelling technical direction, and bringing multiple teams or disciplines along
- Hands-on approach while increasing effectiveness of other engineers through architecture, mentorship, decision-making, and technical leadership
- Deep understanding of modern software-development workflows and recognition of where AI agents require fundamentally new interaction and system designs
- Experience building or operating AI-powered products; understanding of challenges created by nondeterminism, evaluation, latency, reliability, safety, and rapidly evolving model capabilities
- Ability to make thoughtful tradeoffs between speed, product learning, technical quality, and long-term leverage
- Strong perspectives grounded in user evidence while remaining willing to revise as technology and user behavior evolve
- Clear communication across engineering, product, design, research, and executive audiences, especially with substantial uncertainty or organizational complexity
- Energized by defining problems as much as solving them; committed to creating technical and organizational conditions for others to deliver excellent work
