Software Engineer, Scaled Abuse

Location

San Francisco, California, United States

Employment Type

Full time

Compensation

• $266K – $445K • Offers Equity

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-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.

About the Position

The Scaled Abuse team protects OpenAI’s products and customers by detecting, preventing, and responding to fraudulent and abusive behavior at scale. We build and operate the backend and data systems that power real-time detection, investigation workflows, and enforcement - balancing strong protections with a great user experience as the platform grows.

Our work sits at the intersection of engineering and abuse expertise: we partner closely with Trust & Safety, Security, and Product to understand emerging attack patterns, translate messy signals into clear system behavior, and continuously harden our defenses. The problems are dynamic and ambiguous by default, so we value engineers who can quickly dive into an unfamiliar codebase, develop strong intuition about how it works end-to-end, and propose pragmatic improvements that make the entire stack more resilient.

Responsibilities

• Design and build systems for fraud detection and remediation while balancing fraud loss, cost of implementation, and customer experience
• Work closely with finance, security, product, research, and trust & safety operations to holistically combat fraudulent and abusive actors on our system
• Stay abreast of the latest techniques and tools to stay several steps ahead of determined and well-resourced adversaries
• Utilize GPT-5 and future models to more effectively combat fraud and abuse

Requirements

• At least 5 years of software engineering experience in backend and data systems
• At least 2 years experience in fraud or abuse analysis, investigation, and/or operations
• Ability to dive into our codebase, intuit how it works, and have a strong intuition for suggestions that will lead us to a stronger engineering position
• A voracious and intrinsic desire to learn and fill in missing skills. An equally strong talent for sharing that information clearly and concisely with others
• Comfortable with ambiguity and rapidly changing conditions. View changes as an opportunity to add structure and order when necessary
• Experience in Machine Learning techniques is a plus, but not required

Tech Stack

Our infrastructure is built on Terraform, Kubernetes, Azure, Python, Postgres, and Kafka. While we value experience with these technologies, we are primarily looking for engineers with strong technical skills and the ability to quickly pick up new tools and frameworks.

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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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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