Staff / Senior Staff Backend Software Engineer, Workspace Agents
At a glance
Highlights
- Onsite in San Francisco
- Build core infrastructure for AI agents
- High ownership in a small, fast‑moving team
Why this role might suit you
A seasoned backend engineer with deep expertise in distributed systems and product‑driven infrastructure will thrive building the foundational platforms that power AI agents for enterprise customers, enjoying high ownership and direct impact on a fast‑moving, high‑visibility Open
Skills
About the role
ABOUT THE TEAM
The Workspace Agents team builds the product and platform foundations that bring powerful, reliable agents into ChatGPT workspaces. The team recently launched Workspace Agents in ChatGPT, enabling organizations to create agents tailored to their workflows and make them available directly within ChatGPT for employees to use across day-to-day work.
Our work sits at the intersection of agentic product development, enterprise workflows, and backend infrastructure. We build the systems that help agents operate effectively in real business environments — grounding them in organizational context, connecting them to workplace tools and processes, and making them scalable, trustworthy, and useful across entire companies.
The team partners closely across product, design, research, and engineering to turn rapidly evolving model capabilities into durable enterprise experiences. We move quickly, stay close to customer needs, and take broad ownership of an emerging product area that will shape how organizations use AI agents at work.
April 2026 launch: Introducing workspace agents in ChatGPT https://openai.com/index/introducing-workspace-agents-in-chatgpt/
ABOUT THE ROLE
We’re looking for backend engineers to help build the systems behind Workspace Agents and scale them for use across businesses. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys working on product-critical backend infrastructure in an ambiguous, fast-moving environment where both the technical architecture and customer experience are still evolving.
You’ll help design and build the backend foundations that make agents configurable, reliable, and production-ready within enterprise workspaces. Strong candidates will bring deep backend engineering ability, strong product judgment, and the versatility to work across distributed systems, agent platform primitives, and enterprise product requirements.
In this role, you will:
- Design, build, and operate backend systems that power Workspace Agents in ChatGPT and support adoption across organizations
- Develop core infrastructure that helps agents become more reliable, configurable, extensible, and effective in real workplace environments
- Build systems that connect agentic experiences to enterprise context, workflows, and tools while maintaining strong product quality and operational trust
- Work across technical challenges spanning agent orchestration, backend APIs, enterprise integrations, workspace-scale systems, and product foundations
- Partner closely with product, design, research, and engineering stakeholders to translate fast-moving model and customer insights into scalable product capabilities
- Help shape the technical direction of a high-priority, rapidly evolving product area at the center of OpenAI’s enterprise product strategy
- Operate with high ownership in a small, execution-oriented team where priorities may shift quickly and engineers are expected to drive meaningful end-to-end outcomes
Your background might look something like:
- 7+ years of professional backend engineering experience, ideally in product-driven, infrastructure-heavy, or enterprise-oriented environments
- Proficient in one or more backend languages (e.g., Python, Go, Rust, or similar) and distributed systems concepts.
- Strong backend engineering fundamentals, including distributed systems, service architecture, APIs, data modeling, reliability, performance, and production operations
- Experience building scalable product systems that serve complex workflows, multi-user environments, or enterprise customers
- Comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-moving settings where requirements evolve quickly and technical ownership is broad
- Ability to move quickly, make pragmatic tradeoffs, and balance near-term product iteration with long-term system quality
- High agency, strong execution velocity, and a willingness to work across boundaries as the team defines and scales a new product area
- Experience with enterprise software, workflow automation, platform products, integrations, or trust-sensitive systems is a plus
- Interest in AI agents, workplace productivity, and building the backend systems that help organizations adopt and benefit from frontier model capabilities
Title note: At OpenAI, research and engineering hires share the internal title Member of Technical Staff. We use Staff / Senior Staff externally to signal the depth of experience, ownership, and technical leadership expected for this role.
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.
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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
This Backend Engineer role pays $230k-$385k/yr. Within typical range for backend engineer roles in United States.
Questions about this role
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