Principal Software Engineer, Full Stack — Codex

Codex - Engineering - San Francisco

About the Role

We’re hiring a Principal Software Engineer to help define and build the next generation of AI-powered software development workflows.

“Full stack” in this role extends well beyond traditional frontend and backend development. You will set technical direction and lead major product initiatives spanning user interfaces, developer tooling, workflow orchestration, agent and prompt design, backend systems, and cloud infrastructure.

This is a highly product-oriented technical leadership role. You will identify the highest-leverage opportunities across the software development lifecycle, turn 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 the architecture of Codex and how developers around the world design, write, review, test, and maintain software.

You will 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.

In this role, you will

• Set the technical and product direction for significant areas of Codex, translating an evolving product vision into scalable architectures and an actionable engineering strategy.
• Lead complex, multi-quarter initiatives spanning client applications, backend services, agent systems, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling.
• Design AI-powered workflows that generalize across languages, codebases, development environments, and organizations while remaining intuitive, reliable, and safe.
• Make high-consequence architectural decisions under ambiguity, balancing rapid product learning with long-term system quality and adaptability.
• Identify opportunities that cut across existing team or product boundaries, align stakeholders around a direction, and drive the work from exploration through launch and iteration.
• Partner closely with product, design, research, infrastructure, security, and go-to-market teams to turn emerging model capabilities and developer needs into coherent product experiences.
• Work directly with developers, open-source maintainers, startups, and large enterprises to uncover unmet needs and distinguish foundational opportunities from incremental improvements.
• Establish patterns and standards for reliabilityance, experimentation, and evaluation across AI-powered developer workflows.
• Serve as a technical multiplier by reviewing critical designs, mentoring engineers, improving engineering practices, and helping the team navigate its hardest product and technical decisions.
• Contribute directly to implementation, particularly where the problem is novel, technically demanding, or requires connecting multiple layers of the product.

You might thrive in this role if you

• Have led the design and delivery of technically complex, user-facing systems with impact extending beyond a single feature or team.
• Combine deep software-engineering expertise with exceptional product judgment and can move fluently across product interfaces, distributed systems, infrastructure, and developer tooling.
• Have a track record of creating clarity in ambiguous problem spaces, setting a compelling technical direction, and bringing multiple teams or disciplines along with you.
• Remain hands-on while increasing the effectiveness of other engineers through architecture, mentorship, decision-making, and technical leadership.
• Understand modern software-development workflows deeply and can recognize where AI agents require fundamentally new interaction and system designs.
• Have experience building or operating AI-powered products and understand the challenges created by nondeterminism, evaluation, latency, reliability, safety, and rapidly evolving model capabilities.
• Make thoughtful tradeoffs between speed, product learning, technical quality, and long-term leverage.
• Develop strong perspectives from user evidence while remaining willing to revise those perspectives as technology and user behavior evolve.
• Communicate clearly across engineering, product, design, research, and executive audiences, especially when decisions involve substantial uncertainty or organizational complexity.
• Are energized by defining a problem as much as solving it—and by creating the technical and organizational conditions for others to deliver excellent work.

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 the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employeration, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable lawation technology systems and related data security obligations.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

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

$459K – $536K + Offers Equity

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factorsance-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.