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OpenAI's API Safety team is responsible for ensuring safe deployment of frontier AI models through the API platform. The team designs systems and safeguards that help developers understand safety events, share usage context, and apply risk-appropriate controls for their applications.
As a Software Engineer on this team, you will own the full lifecycle of projects from technical design through implementation, launch, and iteration. Key responsibilities include:
- Design and build dashboards and APIs that provide safety controls and customer-facing observability into model behavior and safety events
- Develop scalable backend systems that extend safety capabilities to new use cases, customers, and deployment environments
- Partner with Safety Research and Integrity teams to implement safeguards that mitigate emerging risks from frontier models
- Ensure availability, latency, and scalability of safety systems handling high-volume API traffic
- Raise engineering standards across the team through thoughtful technical leadership
You should have 7+ years of professional backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering experience. You've designed and operated production backend services, developer-facing APIs, or distributed systems at scale. You're proficient in languages like Python, Go, Rust, or TypeScript and have deep systems fundamentals including distributed architecture, concurrency, latency optimization, and observability.
Beyond technical skills, you combine strong product judgment with developer empathy—able to translate complex model and infrastructure capabilities into clear, intuitive APIs. You communicate clearly and collaborate effectively with researchers, product managers, designers, and customers. Experience in observability, abuse prevention, trust and safety, security, or compliance systems is valuable. Most importantly, you're motivated by the mission of helping frontier AI reach developers and businesses responsibly.
