Staff / Senior Staff Backend Engineer, B2B Flywheel

B2B Flywheel is a small, high-leverage team working at the intersection of data science, research, and engineering within OpenAI's B2B organization. The team is focused on building the systems that help OpenAI better understand how businesses and developers use our models, where they encounter friction, and how those signals can improve our products, models, and customer experiences over time.

We operate in highly constrained production environments, including privacy safeguards, low-latency services, and high-traffic API systems. Our work spans real-time backend engineering, data infrastructure, research engineering, and applied data science. The team is small and highly execution-oriented, with broad ownership across the systems that capture, process, and translate critical product and usage signals into better B2B experiences.

About the Role

We're looking for backend software engineers to help build the data and systems infrastructure behind OpenAI's B2B flywheel. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys working across backend systems, data pipelines, and applied ML/DS-adjacent problems - especially in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where the path is not always predefined.

You'll help design and build real-time engineering systems that operate across high-scale API and B2B surfaces, while partnering closely with data science, research, product, and engineering teams. Strong candidates will bring deep backend engineering ability, comfort with data-heavy systems, and the versatility to work across multiple technical domains.

In this role, you will:

• Design, build, and operate backend systems that capture and process critical product, usage, and customer signals across B2B and API surfaces

• Build reliable data pipelines and infrastructure that help translate raw signals into actionable insights, model evaluations, training datasets, and product improvements

• Work on high-traffic, low-latency services in constrained environments, including systems with strict privacy and data-handling requirements

• Collaborate closely with data science, research, product, and infrastructure partners to identify user pain points, measure system behavior, and improve product quality

• Help develop the system needed to support model and product feedback loops, including signal capture, evaluation datasets, classifiers, and analytical tooling

• Operate with high ownership in a small team where priorities may shift quickly and the work spans multiple engineering domains

Your background might look something like:

• 7+ years of professional backend engineering experience, ideally in high-scale, product-driven, or infrastructure-heavy environments

• Strong backend engineering fundamentals, including distributed systems, API services, data modeling, reliability, performance, and production operations

• Experience building or maintaining data pipelines, event systems, logging/telemetry infrastructure, or large-scale data processing systems

• Comfort working near data science, statistics, ML, or research engineering workflows; direct experience is strongly preferred, but not required

• Ability to operate effectively in ambiguous environments where problems are loosely defined and ownership boundaries are broad

• High agency, strong execution velocity, and a willingness to wear multiple hats across backend engineering, data infrastructure, and applied research-adjacent work

• Experience in fast-paced startups, early teams, or similarly high-ownership environments is a plus

• Interest in AI systems, enterprise products, and building the infrastructure that helps improve products and models through real-world usage signals

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.

Compensation Range: $293K - $385K USD

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.

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. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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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 Range: $293K - $385K