Applied AI Engineer, Startups

About the Position

Applied AI Engineer, Startups

Join OpenAI as an Applied AI Engineer for Startups, guiding innovative AI projects from ideation to production.

Location

• San Francisco, California, United States
• New York, New York, United States

Employment Type

Full-time

Compensation

• Salary Range: $211K – $278K
• Benefits:
  • Medical, dental, and vision insurance
  • Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses
  • 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
  • Paid parental leave
  • Paid time off
  • 13+ paid company holidays
  • Mental health and wellness support
  • Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
  • Annual learning and development stipend
  • Daily meals in our offices
  • Relocation support
  • Additional taxable fringe benefits

Responsibilities

• Partner closely with strategic startup customers as their technical thought partner to build novel applications on our API, helping them rapidly move from ideation to scale.
• Provide proactive guidance to maximize business impact and accelerate application development.
• Experiment and prototype alongside customers, demonstrating practical use cases.
• Contribute to open-source resources and scale the function by sharing knowledge, codifying best practices, and publishing useful resources.
• Synthesize and deliver valuable feedback to the Product and Research teams.
• Build relationships within the startup ecosystem, serving as a technical partner to both individual customers and the broader community.
• Partner with the Sales team across startup accounts to identify customer opportunities, align technical work with business goals, and help customers bring AI applications to production.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer, ML engineer or equivalent, ideally in a startup environment; experience as a founder or founding engineer is highly valued.
• Passion for startups and a belief in their potential to become future large enterprises.
• Proficiency in Python, JavaScript, and a strong grasp of AI/LLM best practices.
• Experience building and/or delivering prototypes on top of our API platform.
• Ability to proactively identify opportunities for maximizing our customers’ business value through leveraging the OpenAI API.
• Ownership of problems end-to-end and a willingness to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done.
• A humble attitude, eagerness to help colleagues, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed.
• Effectiveness as a high throughput operator who can drive multiple concurrent projects and prioritize ruthlessly.

About the Team

The Applied AI Engineering team is responsible for ensuring the safe and effective deployment of Generative AI applications for developers and startups. We act as a trusted advisor and thought partner for our customers, working to build an effective backlog of GenAI use cases for their industry and drive them to production through strong technical guidance. OpenAI's customers represent a range of diverse backgrounds and maturity, from early-stage startups to late-stage startups.

About the Company

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.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates.

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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.