Principal Software Engineer, ChatGPT Education and Learning
Principal Software Engineer · Principal · Full Time
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Role
What you'll do.
Lead the technical vision and hands-on development of innovative learning experiences within ChatGPT, working at the intersection of product engineering, AI research, and education. This Principal-level role requires a seasoned full-stack engineer with 10+ years of experience, strong product judgment, and expertise in building scalable consumer products. You'll architect multimodal learning capabilities, guide complex technical initiatives, mentor engineers, and directly impact millions of learners worldwide through AI-powered educational tools.
Responsibilities
- Lead End-to-End Learning Experience Development: Drive the complete lifecycle of learning features within ChatGPT from initial concept exploration and prototyping through production deployment and ongoing iteration. Collaborate with cross-functional teams including product managers, designers, and AI researchers to translate learning use cases into polished, scalable consumer products serving millions of users.
- Set Technical Direction and Architecture Strategy: Establish the technical vision for complex learning initiatives, making architecture decisions that balance rapid experimentation with long-term reliability and maintainability. Guide the engineering team through technical tradeoffs, ensuring systems can scale efficiently while remaining adaptable to evolving product requirements and user feedback.
- Build Multimodal Learning Capabilities: Engineer sophisticated learning interfaces that seamlessly integrate text, images, voice, and interactive components. Design and develop systems that leverage ChatGPT's capabilities to create rich, engaging educational experiences that support sustained learning and progress tracking across diverse subject domains.
- Develop Scalable Backend Services and APIs: Build robust, high-performance backend services and APIs that power learning features throughout the ChatGPT platform. Implement systems designed for reliability, low latency, and horizontal scalability to support millions of concurrent learners while maintaining data integrity and security.
- Drive Product and Design Decision-Making: Partner closely with product managers and designers to inform strategic decisions about feature prioritization, user experience design, and technical feasibility. Bring technical insight, user research synthesis, and sound engineering judgment to tradeoff discussions, helping the team define what to build and how it serves learners.
- Collaborate on AI Model Integration: Work with AI research teams and platform engineers to prototype and integrate new language model capabilities into practical learning applications. Bridge the gap between research innovations and production systems, ensuring new AI capabilities are properly optimized, tested, and deployed to users.
- Optimize Performance, Reliability, and Usability: Drive continuous improvement across all learning surfaces using data-driven experimentation, performance profiling, and direct user feedback. Implement monitoring, instrumentation, and experimentation infrastructure to measure learning outcomes and user satisfaction, guiding technical improvements.
- Mentor and Support Engineering Team Growth: Provide technical mentorship, detailed code reviews, and clear architectural guidance to other engineers on the team. Foster a culture of technical excellence, share domain knowledge about learning product development, and help teammates develop their engineering skills and decision-making capabilities.
Qualifications
What we look for.
Technical
Full-Stack Web Development
Expert-level proficiency building production web applications with modern frontend frameworks and backend services. Ability to make architectural decisions across the entire stack, optimize performance at all layers, and ensure secure, scalable system design.
Scalable Backend Architecture
Deep expertise designing and implementing distributed systems, microservices architectures, and APIs that serve millions of requests with high availability and low latency. Experience with database optimization, caching strategies, and handling complex data consistency requirements.
Frontend UI/UX Implementation
Strong capability building polished, responsive user interfaces with attention to detail and user experience. Experience with modern frontend frameworks, accessibility standards (WCAG), performance optimization, and creating smooth, intuitive interactive experiences.
Multimodal System Integration
Experience integrating multiple input and output modalities (text, images, audio, video) into cohesive applications. Understanding of real-time data handling, concurrent request processing, and providing seamless user experiences across different content types.
Performance Optimization and Observability
Expertise in identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks through profiling, benchmarking, and optimization. Strong knowledge of monitoring, logging, tracing, and building observable systems that surface issues in production environments.
Data Engineering and Analytics
Solid understanding of data pipeline design, analytics instrumentation, and working with large-scale datasets. Ability to design experiments and interpret results to drive product decisions based on empirical evidence.
Education
Computer Science or Related Field (Preferred)
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical discipline. Equivalent practical experience and demonstrated mastery of core computer science fundamentals is equally valued.
Experience
10+ Years of Full-Stack Software Engineering
Demonstrated track record of shipping multiple high-quality consumer products across the full technology stack. Experience working in fast-paced environments where you've owned features from architecture through launch and maintenance.
Leadership of Complex Technical Initiatives
Proven ability to lead multi-faceted technical projects, make architectural decisions that impact product direction, and balance competing engineering concerns such as development velocity, code quality, scalability, and maintainability. Experience mentoring junior and mid-level engineers.
Cross-Functional Product Collaboration
Extensive experience partnering with product managers and designers in close working relationships. Track record of translating ambiguous product opportunities into clear technical requirements and working effectively in collaborative, fast-moving product teams.
Consumer Product Development
Deep experience building products for end consumers with focus on user experience quality, performance, and reliability. Demonstrated ability to take ownership from initial concept through production launch, iteration based on user feedback, and long-term maintenance.
Educational Technology or Learning Products (Preferred)
Background building interactive educational tools, learning management systems, online tutoring platforms, or similar ed-tech applications. Understanding of learning science principles, instructional design, or experience with products that support knowledge retention and skill development is valued.
AI-Powered Application Development (Preferred)
Experience architecting and developing systems built around large language models, generative AI capabilities, or other advanced AI systems. Knowledge of prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), fine-tuning approaches, or model deployment in production environments.
Skills
Required
System Architecture and Design
Ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make sound architectural tradeoffs between performance and maintainability, and guide technical direction for complex initiatives.
Full-Stack Development
Hands-on expertise across frontend, backend, databases, and infrastructure. Comfortable owning features end-to-end and making informed technical decisions at all layers.
Product Engineering Judgment
Strong instincts for what makes great consumer products, ability to understand user needs, translate them into technical requirements, and maintain high standards for quality and user experience.
Technical Leadership and Communication
Ability to articulate complex technical concepts clearly, guide architectural discussions, mentor other engineers, and drive alignment across cross-functional teams on technical direction.
Ambiguity Navigation
Skilled at working in undefined problem spaces, asking clarifying questions, and bringing structure and clarity to ambiguous opportunities. Ability to establish technical requirements and roadmaps from vague product inspiration.
Hands-On Coding and Technical Execution
Remain actively involved in implementation, code review, and technical problem-solving while scaling your impact through mentorship. Demonstrated commitment to code quality, testing, and engineering best practices.
Experimentation and Data-Driven Decision Making
Experience designing experiments, interpreting user feedback and analytics data, and using empirical results to guide product and technical decisions. Strong analytical mindset applied to engineering problems.
Preferred
Large Language Model Application Development
Nice to haveExperience building production systems that leverage large language models, understanding prompt optimization, context management, and techniques for improving model outputs in real-world applications.
Educational Technology Domain Knowledge
Nice to haveFamiliarity with learning science principles, instructional design patterns, or experience with educational platforms. Understanding of how technology can enhance learning outcomes and support different learning modalities.
Consumer Product at Scale
Nice to haveBackground building consumer products that have achieved significant adoption (millions of users). Experience optimizing products based on user feedback, telemetry, and behavioral analytics.
Collaborative Product Development
Nice to haveTrack record of working effectively in tight product-engineering-design partnerships, contributing design thinking to product decisions, and elevating the team's overall product craft.
Infrastructure and DevOps
Nice to haveComfort with modern deployment practices, containerization, orchestration, and infrastructure-as-code. Experience reducing deployment friction and enabling rapid experimentation in production.
Performance Engineering
Nice to haveDemonstrated expertise optimizing application performance, reducing latency, improving throughput, and implementing effective caching and optimization strategies at scale.
Tech stack
Languages
Frameworks
Databases
Tools
Other
Compensation
Pay and benefits.
Base·USD 459,000 – 536,000
Equity·Stock options
Full posting
Original listing.
About the Team
The ChatGPT Learning team creates the next generation of learning experiences within ChatGPT. Millions of people use ChatGPT each week to explore concepts, practice skills, and work through challenges, making learning one of the platform’s largest consumer use cases.
We want ChatGPT to support sustained learning and progress over time, beyond answering individual questions. We’re exploring how AI can make powerful learning tools more accessible, helping people understand the world, develop skills, and pursue their goals.
Our work brings together product engineering, design, AI research, and education to serve learners around the world.
About the Role
As a Principal Software Engineer on the ChatGPT Learning team, you will set technical direction and lead the design and development of products that help millions of people learn with ChatGPT.
You’ll remain hands-on across the stack, building polished interfaces and scalable backend services. Working closely with product managers, designers, researchers, and platform teams, you’ll bring new model capabilities into everyday learning experiences.
You’ll drive product and design decisions alongside your cross-functional partners, helping define what we build, how it works, and how it serves learners. We’re looking for an engineer with strong product judgment who can turn ambiguous opportunities into clear direction, lead complex initiatives from concept through launch, and raise the quality of the team’s technical work.
This position is based in San Francisco or New York City, with three days each week in the office. Relocation assistance is available to new employees.
What You’ll Do
Lead end-to-end development of learning experiences in ChatGPT, from early exploration through production and iteration.
Drive product and design decisions with product managers and designers, bringing technical insight, user feedback, and sound judgment to priorities and tradeoffs.
Set technical direction for complex initiatives and guide architecture decisions that support rapid experimentation and long-term reliability.
Build multimodal learning capabilities that combine text, images, voice, and interactive interfaces.
Develop scalable services and APIs to support learning features throughout ChatGPT.
Work with researchers, platform teams, designers, and engineers to prototype ideas and bring new AI capabilities to users.
Improve performance, reliability, and usability across ChatGPT’s learning surfaces, using experiments and user feedback to guide improvements.
Support other engineers through mentorship, code reviews, and clear technical guidance.
You Might Thrive Here If You
Have 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping high-quality products across the full stack.
Have led complex technical initiatives and made architecture decisions that balance product needs, development speed, and maintainability.
Have experience driving product and design decisions in close partnership with product managers and designers.
Enjoy building consumer products and taking ownership from initial concept through production.
Bring clarity to ambiguous problems and translate them into practical product solutions.
Have strong product engineering instincts and care deeply about the quality of the user experience.
Have experience building interactive educational tools or learning products.
Have experience developing AI-powered applications or systems built around large language models.
Want to build products with meaningful global impact and expand access to education and learning opportunities.
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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