# Principal Software Engineer, Full Stack — Codex
**Company:** [OpenAI](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/openai)
Principal Software Engineer, Full Stack at OpenAI's Codex division—a technical leadership role designing and building the next generation of AI-powered software development workflows. This senior position combines hands-on implementation expertise with strategic direction-setting across full-stack systems including user interfaces, developer tooling, AI agent orchestration, backend services, and cloud infrastructure. The role demands deep software engineering judgment, exceptional product acumen, and proven ability to lead complex multi-quarter initiatives that shape how developers worldwide design, write, review, test, and maintain software using AI capabilities.
**Role:** Principal Software Engineer
**Seniority:** Principal
**Locations:** San Francisco
**Salary:** 459000–536000 USD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/74842880-e750-4664-9e2e-83b4c96c5a03)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/openai/principal-software-engineer-full-stack-codex
---
## Responsibilities

- Technical Strategy and Architectural Direction: Set technical and product direction for significant areas of Codex by translating evolving product vision into scalable architectures and actionable engineering strategies. Make high-consequence architectural decisions under ambiguity, balancing rapid product learning with long-term system quality, adaptability, and resilience across distributed systems.
- Cross-Functional Initiative Leadership: Lead complex, multi-quarter initiatives spanning client applications, backend services, AI agent systems, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling. Identify opportunities cutting across team boundaries, align stakeholders around strategic direction, and drive work from exploration through launch and iterative refinement.
- AI-Powered Workflow Design: Design AI-powered development workflows that generalize across programming languages, codebases, development environments, and organizations while remaining intuitive, reliable, and safe. Address unique challenges of nondeterminism, latency variability, model reliability, and rapidly evolving AI capabilities.
- Stakeholder Engagement and Discovery: Work directly with developers, open-source maintainers, startups, and large enterprises to uncover unmet needs in software development. Partner closely with product, design, research, infrastructure, security, and go-to-market teams to translate emerging model capabilities and developer needs into coherent product experiences.
- Engineering Standards and Observability: Establish patterns and standards for reliability, observability, performance, experimentation, and evaluation across AI-powered developer workflows. Implement best practices ensuring systems maintain quality, safety, and performance at scale across diverse usage patterns.
- Technical Leadership and Mentorship: Serve as a technical multiplier by reviewing critical system designs, mentoring engineers, improving engineering practices and processes, and helping teams navigate their most challenging product and technical decisions. Raise the technical judgment, execution quality, and ambition of the broader engineering organization.
- Hands-On Implementation: Contribute directly to implementation of novel, technically demanding problems requiring deep understanding of multiple system layers. Participate actively in code design and delivery, particularly for problems that establish new patterns or require connecting product, infrastructure, and AI components.

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Computer Science Fundamentals","description":"Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, related field, or equivalent industry experience demonstrating mastery of data structures, algorithms, distributed systems principles, and software design patterns."}

### technical

- {"name":"Full-Stack Systems Architecture","description":"Expert-level proficiency designing and building complex, user-facing systems spanning frontend interfaces, backend services, APIs, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure. Demonstrated ability to architect systems that integrate AI components with traditional software patterns."}
- {"name":"AI Product Development","description":"Proven experience building or operating AI-powered products with deep understanding of challenges including model nondeterminism, inference latency, reliability concerns, safety considerations, hallucination mitigation, and rapidly evolving model capabilities. Experience with prompt engineering, model fine-tuning, or AI evaluation frameworks."}
- {"name":"Developer Tooling and Workflows","description":"Deep expertise in modern software development workflows, tools, and practices. Understanding of CI/CD pipelines, code review processes, testing frameworks, version control systems, IDE integrations, and developer experience optimization. Recognition of where AI agents require fundamentally new interaction and system designs."}
- {"name":"Large-Scale System Design","description":"Experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale with attention to performance, reliability, observability, and maintainability. Proficiency with concepts including eventual consistency, fault tolerance, monitoring and alerting, system instrumentation, and managing technical debt."}
- {"name":"Production Engineering and Operations","description":"Hands-on experience deploying and maintaining production systems in cloud environments. Familiarity with containerization, orchestration, infrastructure-as-code, incident response, and operational excellence practices. Ability to design systems that remain reliable and debuggable under real-world conditions."}

### experience

- {"name":"Multi-Year Technical Leadership","description":"7+ years of software engineering experience with minimum 3+ years in senior technical leadership or principal engineer roles. Demonstrated track record of influencing technical direction, mentoring other engineers, and elevating team capabilities."}
- {"name":"Complex System Delivery","description":"Proven ability to design, build, and ship technically complex, user-facing systems with measurable impact extending well beyond a single feature. Evidence of leading projects through design, implementation, launch, and post-launch optimization phases."}
- {"name":"Cross-Functional Leadership","description":"Track record of creating clarity in ambiguous problem spaces, setting compelling technical direction, and bringing multiple engineering teams and disciplines (product, design, research, infrastructure) into alignment. Experience navigating organizational complexity and ambiguous requirements."}
- {"name":"Technical Judgment Under Uncertainty","description":"Demonstrated ability to make thoughtful, well-reasoned tradeoffs between speed, product learning, technical quality, and long-term leverage. Experience developing strong perspectives grounded in user evidence while remaining willing to revise positions as technology and behavior evolve."}

## Skills

### required

- {"name":"Full-Stack Software Engineering","description":"End-to-end expertise spanning frontend frameworks, backend APIs, database design, and cloud infrastructure. Ability to think holistically across technology layers and make sound architectural decisions balancing user experience, system performance, and operational concerns."}
- {"name":"AI/ML Systems Integration","description":"Experience integrating machine learning models and AI components into production systems. Understanding of model serving, inference optimization, handling model uncertainty, and building reliable applications around AI capabilities."}
- {"name":"System Design and Architecture","description":"Mastery of large-scale system design including scalability, reliability, performance optimization, observability, and maintainability. Ability to evaluate technology tradeoffs and design systems that remain viable across years of evolution."}
- {"name":"Technical Leadership and Communication","description":"Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical concepts across engineering, product, design, research, and executive audiences. Skill in making group decisions amid substantial uncertainty and organizational complexity while building consensus."}
- {"name":"Product and User Empathy","description":"Deep understanding of developer workflows, pain points, and needs. Ability to translate user problems into technical requirements and maintain focus on user value throughout implementation. Skill in discovering unmet needs through user research and engagement."}
- {"name":"Strategic Problem Decomposition","description":"Ability to identify highest-leverage opportunities across the software development lifecycle. Skill in turning ambiguous user and technical problems into durable product and system strategies with clear success metrics and implementation plans."}

### preferred

- {"name":"Large Language Models and Generative AI","description":"Direct experience working with large language models, prompt engineering, or generative AI systems. Understanding of capabilities, limitations, and best practices for integrating LLMs into production applications. Familiarity with OpenAI's models or API is advantageous."}
- {"name":"Developer Tools and IDEs","description":"Experience building developer productivity tools, IDE plugins, code analysis systems, or developer platforms. Understanding of how developers interact with tools and what drives adoption and retention of developer products."}
- {"name":"Open-Source Engagement","description":"Involvement in open-source projects, either as maintainer or significant contributor. Understanding of open-source community dynamics, compatibility concerns, and how to build products that work seamlessly with diverse ecosystem tools."}
- {"name":"Infrastructure and DevOps","description":"Strong hands-on experience with cloud platforms, Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, deployment pipelines, and observability tools. Comfort designing infrastructure solutions that support evolving product requirements."}
- {"name":"Experimentation and Metrics","description":"Experience designing and implementing A/B testing frameworks, defining success metrics, running experiments, and making data-driven product decisions. Understanding of statistical rigor in product experimentation."}

## Tech stack

### tools

- {"name":"Kubernetes","description":"Container orchestration platform for managing scalable, reliable deployment of AI services and backend infrastructure at scale."}
- {"name":"Prometheus and Grafana","description":"Monitoring and observability tools essential for maintaining visibility into system health, performance, and reliability across distributed AI services."}
- {"name":"Git and GitHub","description":"Version control systems fundamental to software development. Critical for understanding developer workflows and integrating seamlessly with existing development environments."}
- {"name":"OpenAI API","description":"Direct experience with OpenAI's models and API integration patterns, understanding model versions, capabilities, and deployment considerations."}
- {"name":"CI/CD Platforms (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI)","description":"Continuous integration and deployment tools for automating testing, building, and releasing software. Understanding of how AI-powered tooling integrates with development pipelines."}

### others

- {"name":"LSP (Language Server Protocol)","description":"Standard protocol for IDE integrations enabling code intelligence, completion, and analysis. Understanding of LSP is valuable for building developer tooling that integrates with multiple IDEs."}
- {"name":"Prompt Engineering and Fine-Tuning","description":"Techniques for optimizing model behavior through prompting strategies, in-context learning, and potentially fine-tuning. Critical for building reliable AI-powered code generation systems."}
- {"name":"Security and Privacy Best Practices","description":"Understanding of security considerations in AI systems including data privacy, model security, access controls, and compliance requirements relevant to handling developer code."}
- {"name":"Observability and Debugging","description":"Techniques for instrumenting complex systems with logging, tracing, metrics, and profiling to understand and debug production behavior. Essential for maintaining reliability and performance."}

### databases

- {"name":"PostgreSQL","description":"Reliable relational database for persistent storage of user data, project metadata, and system state. Essential for ACID compliance in developer tooling."}
- {"name":"Vector Databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus)","description":"Specialized databases for storing and querying embeddings, critical for semantic search, code retrieval, and context management in AI-powered code generation systems."}
- {"name":"Redis or Memcached","description":"In-memory caching and session management critical for low-latency user experiences and high-frequency operations in developer tooling."}

### languages

- {"name":"Python","description":"Primary language for AI/ML systems, backend services, and tooling at modern AI companies. Essential for working with model serving frameworks and data processing pipelines."}
- {"name":"TypeScript/JavaScript","description":"Primary language for web-based user interfaces and full-stack development. Critical for modern developer tooling and web-based IDEs that might integrate with Codex."}
- {"name":"Rust or Go","description":"Systems programming languages often used for performance-critical backend services, infrastructure tooling, and CLI applications. Important for building scalable, reliable infrastructure components."}

### frameworks

- {"name":"React or Vue.js","description":"Modern frontend frameworks for building responsive user interfaces. Essential for creating intuitive developer experiences in web-based code editing and IDE tools."}
- {"name":"FastAPI or Django","description":"Python web frameworks for building REST APIs and backend services that integrate AI models with frontend applications."}
- {"name":"LangChain or Similar AI Orchestration","description":"Frameworks for orchestrating complex AI workflows, chaining model calls, managing prompts, and building agent systems that adapt to developer needs."}
- {"name":"gRPC or Protocol Buffers","description":"High-performance communication protocols for microservices architecture enabling efficient model serving and inter-service communication."}

## Benefits

### benefits

- {"name":"Comprehensive Health Coverage","description":"Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance plans with company contributions covering significant portions of employee and family premiums. Coverage includes preventive care, specialist services, and mental health support."}
- {"name":"Retirement Planning","description":"401(k) retirement savings plan with competitive employer match, enabling long-term wealth building. Access to financial planning resources and retirement consulting services."}
- {"name":"Equity Compensation","description":"Significant stock options or RSU grants providing ownership stake in OpenAI and alignment with company success. Vesting schedules typically span 4 years with standard one-year cliffs."}
- {"name":"Flexible Time Off","description":"Generous paid time off policy with flexible vacation days, sick leave, and personal days. Encouragement to maintain work-life balance and take adequate time for rest and personal development."}
- {"name":"Professional Development","description":"Support for continuous learning including conference attendance, technical training, certification programs, and educational resources. Access to learning platforms and budget allocation for skill development."}
- {"name":"Parental Support","description":"Paid parental leave for birth, adoption, and fostering. Family planning benefits including fertility support and adoption assistance programs."}
- {"name":"Wellness Programs","description":"On-site or subsidized fitness facilities, mental health resources, wellness coaching, and employee assistance programs. Support for physical and mental wellbeing."}
- {"name":"Work Environment and Culture","description":"Collaborative work environment with emphasis on innovation, diversity, and inclusion. Access to cutting-edge technology and resources needed for impactful work in AI development and deployment."}

## Compensation

- **max:** 500000
- **min:** 300000
- **currency:** USD
- **stockOptions:** true

## Interview process

### steps

## Full description
**About the Role**  
We’re hiring a Principal Software Engineer to help define and build the next generation of AI-powered software development workflows.

  
“Full stack” in this role extends well beyond traditional frontend and backend development. You will set technical direction and lead major product initiatives spanning user interfaces, developer tooling, workflow orchestration, agent and prompt design, backend systems, and cloud infrastructure.

  
This is a highly product-oriented technical leadership role. You will identify the highest-leverage opportunities across the software development lifecycle, turn ambiguous user and technical problems into durable product and system strategies, and lead execution across multiple engineers and partner teams. Your work will shape both the architecture of Codex and how developers around the world design, write, review, test, and maintain software.  
You will operate as a senior individual contributor: remaining deeply involved in design and implementation while raising the technical judgment, execution quality, and ambition of the broader team.

  
**In this role, you will**

* Set the technical and product direction for significant areas of Codex, translating an evolving product vision into scalable architectures and an actionable engineering strategy.
* Lead complex, multi-quarter initiatives spanning client applications, backend services, agent systems, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling.
* Design AI-powered workflows that generalize across languages, codebases, development environments, and organizations while remaining intuitive, reliable, and safe.
* Make high-consequence architectural decisions under ambiguity, balancing rapid product learning with long-term system quality and adaptability.
* Identify opportunities that cut across existing team or product boundaries, align stakeholders around a direction, and drive the work from exploration through launch and iteration.
* Partner closely with product, design, research, infrastructure, security, and go-to-market teams to turn emerging model capabilities and developer needs into coherent product experiences.
* Work directly with developers, open-source maintainers, startups, and large enterprises to uncover unmet needs and distinguish foundational opportunities from incremental improvements.
* Establish patterns and standards for reliability, observability, performance, experimentation, and evaluation across AI-powered developer workflows.
* Serve as a technical multiplier by reviewing critical designs, mentoring engineers, improving engineering practices, and helping the team navigate its hardest product and technical decisions.
* Contribute directly to implementation, particularly where the problem is novel, technically demanding, or requires connecting multiple layers of the product.

**You might thrive in this role if you**

* Have led the design and delivery of technically complex, user-facing systems with impact extending beyond a single feature or team.
* Combine deep software-engineering expertise with exceptional product judgment and can move fluently across product interfaces, distributed systems, infrastructure, and developer tooling.
* Have a track record of creating clarity in ambiguous problem spaces, setting a compelling technical direction, and bringing multiple teams or disciplines along with you.
* Remain hands-on while increasing the effectiveness of other engineers through architecture, mentorship, decision-making, and technical leadership.
* Understand modern software-development workflows deeply and can recognize where AI agents require fundamentally new interaction and system designs.
* Have experience building or operating AI-powered products and understand the challenges created by nondeterminism, evaluation, latency, reliability, safety, and rapidly evolving model capabilities.
* Make thoughtful tradeoffs between speed, product learning, technical quality, and long-term leverage.
* Develop strong perspectives from user evidence while remaining willing to revise those perspectives as technology and user behavior evolve.
* Communicate clearly across engineering, product, design, research, and executive audiences, especially when decisions involve substantial uncertainty or organizational complexity.
* Are energized by defining a problem as much as solving it—and by creating the technical and organizational conditions for others to deliver excellent work.

**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](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf).

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.