Software Engineer, Real Time · OpenAI

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 18:28:03 GMT
Engineering

OpenAI · Seattle · $185K – $385K • Offers Equity · onsite

Location

Seattle

Employment Type

Full time

Department

Applied AI

Compensation

$185K – $385K • 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 for eligible employees and 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 and safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked)

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 Team

We bring OpenAI's technology to the world through products like ChatGPT and the OpenAI API. Our customers build fast-growing businesses around our APIs, which power products that were never before possible. We simultaneously ensure that our powerful tools are used responsibly. Safe deployment is more important to us than unfettered growth.

About the Role

We’re looking for experienced and creative engineers to help us scale our existing systems and build the next-generation system to enable a whole new class of products. We are seeking an engineer who is comfortable with full-stack development and has experience with Real-Time Communication (RTC). Candidates should have experience with scaled real-time communication systems in production.

Responsibilities

Design and build development and production platforms that power our systems.

Partner with researchers, engineers, product managers, and designers to bring new features and research capabilities to the world.

Accelerate engineering productivity by empowering your fellow engineers with excellent tooling and systems.

Build and provide operational support for globally deployed systems, powering some of the most advanced products in the market. This includes participating in an on-call rotation to respond to critical incidents as needed.

You might thrive in this role if you:

Have significant experience building (and rebuilding) production systems to deliver new product capabilities and handle increasing scale.

Have experience with real-time communication products and systems, including audio and video calling, WebRTC or competing protocols, encoding/decoding, signaling, lip sync, etc.

Care deeply about user experience and take pride in building products that solve customer needs.

Have a humble attitude, eagerness to help colleagues, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed.

Own problems end-to-end and are willing to pick up any necessary knowledge to get the job done.

Have been a startup founder or an early-stage engineer.

Experience in Machine Learning techniques is a plus but not required.

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.