Applied AI Engineer, API Platform, Digital Natives

About this role

About the team

The Applied AI Engineering team is responsible for ensuring the safe and effective deployment of generative AI applications for developers and enterprises. We act as a trusted advisor and thought partner for our API customers, working to build an effective backlog of frontier AI use cases for their industry and drive them to production through strong technical guidance.

As an Applied AI Engineer in the Digital Native segment, you’ll work with industry-leading technology companies like Stripe, Uber, and Reddit to bring new AI capabilities into the products their customers use every day. You’ll partner directly with experienced product and engineering teams to turn frontier model capabilities into new features and agentic experiences. The work combines rapid experimentation with the demands of established products: complex systems, real users, and high expectations for quality and performance. Lessons from these deployments inform OpenAI’s product and research teams.

About the role

You will combine deep technical judgment, hands-on engineering, and customer leadership to take ambitious ideas from use-case selection and architecture through prototyping, evaluation, production launch, and scale. You will write and debug code, build evaluation systems, resolve complex integrations, and guide decisions involving model behavior, reliability, latency, cost, safety, security, governance, and operational readiness. Success is measured by production systems, sustained adoption, and meaningful customer impact – not simply activity or successful demonstrations. This is a rare opportunity to work on consequential real-world deployments at the frontier of AI while directly influencing how OpenAI’s products evolve.

This role is based in our SF or Seattle office. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will: