# Product Engineer, Ona
**Company:** [OpenAI](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/openai)
Product Engineer at OpenAI's Ona team, focused on building enterprise-grade infrastructure for AI agents to work reliably in production across secure, customer-controlled cloud environments. You'll design and implement Go-based backend systems, orchestration engines, and security workflows that enable developers and agents to collaborate effectively in parallel. This role requires strong distributed systems knowledge, production backend experience, and a product-oriented mindset to own solutions from customer discovery through launch and operational excellence.
**Role:** Backend Engineer
**Seniority:** Mid
**Locations:** San Francisco
**Salary:** 255000–445000 USD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/c442eab0-b8b4-40f6-b0f2-0fc91aea294a)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/openai/product-engineer-ona
---
## Responsibilities

- Customer-Focused Backend Development: Work directly with enterprise customers to understand and build developer and security workflows, from project initialization through investigation of findings, review of agent-generated changes, and verification of fixes. This includes translating customer pain points into technical requirements and maintaining close feedback loops throughout the development cycle.
- Go Service and API Architecture: Design and implement scalable Go services and REST/gRPC APIs for provisioning cloud environments, executing agents in customer infrastructure, and integrating with ecosystem tools including source control systems (Git), CI/CD pipelines, and developer tooling. Focus on clean API design, versioning strategies, and backward compatibility.
- Distributed Orchestration Systems: Engineer reliable orchestration systems for long-running, parallel workloads with sophisticated state management, retry mechanisms, graceful cancellation, and recovery patterns. Handle complex distributed system challenges including consensus, idempotency, and failure scenarios across multiple execution environments.
- Security Infrastructure and Compliance: Integrate security-first design into execution workflows by implementing granular permission systems, secure credential handling, workload isolation mechanisms, comprehensive audit logging, and compliance controls. Ensure security by design principles are embedded in all backend infrastructure and operational procedures.
- Production Operations and Reliability: Own end-to-end production quality including comprehensive testing strategies (unit, integration, end-to-end), safe deployment procedures with canary rollouts, production observability through metrics and logs, performance optimization, incident response, and operational runbooks. Establish high standards for system reliability and monitoring.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with frontend engineers, product designers, infrastructure teams, and security specialists to translate complex backend capabilities into intuitive user experiences. Communicate technical decisions clearly across disciplines, participate in design reviews, and support product launches and iteration cycles.

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Computer Science or Related Field","description":"Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical professional experience. Strong fundamentals in algorithms, data structures, and systems programming are essential for this role."}

### technical

- {"name":"Production Backend Systems","description":"Demonstrated experience building, deploying, and operating large-scale production backend systems in Go or similar statically-typed languages. Must understand scalability patterns, performance optimization, and operational considerations for systems serving thousands of concurrent users."}
- {"name":"Distributed Systems and Concurrency","description":"Strong foundational knowledge of distributed systems concepts including consistency models, consensus algorithms, CAP theorem, and practical concurrency patterns. Ability to reason about failure modes, recovery strategies, and eventual consistency in multi-node environments."}
- {"name":"Linux and Container Technologies","description":"Practical hands-on experience with Linux operating systems, container technologies (Docker), orchestration platforms (Kubernetes), and cloud infrastructure fundamentals. Comfortable working with system-level concerns, resource management, and containerized deployment models."}
- {"name":"Cloud Infrastructure and Networking","description":"Working knowledge of major cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) including compute services, networking, storage, and managed services. Understanding of networking concepts including routing, DNS resolution, TLS/SSL, VPNs, and secure connectivity between services."}
- {"name":"API Design and Data Modeling","description":"Ability to design clean, intuitive APIs that abstract complexity and provide good developer experience. Experience designing normalized and denormalized data models, schema evolution strategies, and migration planning for evolving systems."}

### experience

- {"name":"Production Backend Engineering","description":"Minimum 5-7 years of professional software engineering experience with at least 3-4 years focused on backend systems development. Experience shipping multiple production features or systems to real users and maintaining them through scaling."}
- {"name":"Cloud-Native Development","description":"2+ years of hands-on experience with modern cloud infrastructure, containerization, and orchestration technologies. Experience deploying and managing applications in cloud environments with focus on scalability and reliability."}
- {"name":"Developer Platform or Infrastructure Engineering","description":"Preferred experience building developer-facing platforms, infrastructure tooling, or internal developer platforms. Understanding of developer experience patterns, API usability, and feedback loops between platform teams and consumers."}

## Skills

### required

- {"name":"Go Programming","description":"Expert-level proficiency in Go including concurrency patterns, interfaces, package design, and Go-specific idioms. Experience building production microservices and backend systems in Go."}
- {"name":"Distributed Systems Design","description":"Ability to architect systems handling concurrency, state consistency, and failure recovery. Understanding of distributed tracing, observability patterns, and system monitoring at scale."}
- {"name":"Cloud Infrastructure","description":"Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) including compute, networking, storage, and managed services. Comfortable with Infrastructure-as-Code practices."}
- {"name":"Container and Orchestration Technologies","description":"Working knowledge of Docker, container runtimes, and orchestration platforms like Kubernetes. Understanding of containerized application deployment and scaling strategies."}
- {"name":"Linux Systems Administration","description":"Practical experience with Linux operating systems, command-line tools, system-level debugging, and performance profiling. Comfort troubleshooting system-level issues."}
- {"name":"RESTful API Design","description":"Experience designing and implementing RESTful APIs or gRPC services with proper error handling, versioning, and documentation. Understanding of API security and authentication mechanisms."}

### preferred

- {"name":"Kubernetes Expertise","description":"Deep experience with Kubernetes deployment, configuration, networking, and operator development. Understanding of custom resource definitions (CRDs) and advanced scheduling scenarios."}
- {"name":"Workflow Engine Development","description":"Experience building or working with workflow orchestration systems, task schedulers, or distributed job processing frameworks. Understanding of durability, idempotency, and state management in long-running tasks."}
- {"name":"Security Engineering","description":"Background in security-focused development including credential management, identity and access control (IAM), encryption, audit logging, and compliance considerations in system design."}
- {"name":"Networking Protocols and Connectivity","description":"Advanced understanding of networking fundamentals including DNS, routing, VPNs, TLS/SSL, and secure connectivity patterns. Experience with network troubleshooting and optimization."}
- {"name":"Sandboxing and Isolation Technologies","description":"Experience with containerization security, sandboxing techniques, resource limits, and process isolation. Understanding of trusted execution environments or similar isolation mechanisms."}
- {"name":"AI Agent Systems","description":"Familiarity with AI agent architectures, agentic workflows, tool integration patterns, and AI-driven systems development. Understanding of how agents interact with APIs and tools."}
- {"name":"CI/CD and DevOps","description":"Experience designing or implementing continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines. Familiarity with GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or similar platforms."}
- {"name":"Observability and Monitoring","description":"Experience building systems with comprehensive logging, metrics collection, and distributed tracing. Familiarity with tools like Datadog, Prometheus, ELK stack, or Honeycomb."}
- {"name":"Frontend Technologies","description":"Optional but valuable: experience with React, Vue, or other modern frontend frameworks to better collaborate with frontend teams on user experience and API design."}

## Tech stack

### tools

- {"name":"Kubernetes","description":"Container orchestration platform for deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications in production."}
- {"name":"Docker","description":"Containerization platform for packaging applications and ensuring consistency across environments."}
- {"name":"Git and GitHub","description":"Version control and collaboration platform with integration into CI/CD pipelines and source control management."}
- {"name":"Terraform or CloudFormation","description":"Infrastructure-as-Code tools for provisioning and managing cloud infrastructure declaratively."}
- {"name":"Prometheus and Grafana","description":"Monitoring and observability stack for metrics collection, alerting, and visualization of system health."}

### others

- {"name":"AWS, GCP, or Azure","description":"Major cloud platforms providing compute, networking, storage, and managed services for running production systems at scale."}
- {"name":"Linux Operating System","description":"Core infrastructure for running backend services with deep system-level understanding and administration skills."}
- {"name":"Distributed Systems Patterns","description":"Event sourcing, saga patterns, eventual consistency, circuit breakers, and other architectural patterns for resilient systems."}
- {"name":"Security Practices","description":"Zero-trust architecture, credential management, encryption, audit logging, and compliance frameworks for secure systems."}
- {"name":"CI/CD Pipelines","description":"Automated testing, building, and deployment practices using tools like GitHub Actions or similar platforms."}

### databases

- {"name":"PostgreSQL","description":"Robust relational database for persistent data storage with strong consistency guarantees and advanced features."}
- {"name":"Redis","description":"In-memory data store for caching, session management, distributed locks, and real-time data operations."}
- {"name":"Cloud-Native Databases","description":"Experience with managed databases from cloud providers like AWS RDS, Google Cloud SQL, or Azure Database services."}

### languages

- {"name":"Go","description":"Primary language for building backend services, APIs, and orchestration systems. Go's concurrency model and performance make it ideal for distributed systems."}
- {"name":"Python","description":"Useful for scripting, automation, infrastructure-as-code, and tooling around the main backend systems."}
- {"name":"SQL","description":"For designing database schemas, writing complex queries, and working with relational databases."}
- {"name":"Bash/Shell","description":"For system-level scripting, container entrypoints, and Linux system administration."}

### frameworks

- {"name":"gRPC","description":"High-performance RPC framework for service-to-service communication with strong typing and efficient serialization."}
- {"name":"Protocol Buffers","description":"Serialization format for defining APIs and data structures with language-agnostic compatibility."}
- {"name":"Go HTTP Standard Library","description":"Core Go net/http package for building RESTful APIs with minimal external dependencies."}
- {"name":"Gin or Echo","description":"Lightweight Go web frameworks for building REST APIs with routing, middleware, and error handling."}

## Benefits

### benefits

- {"name":"Health Insurance","description":"Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with multiple plan options to meet diverse healthcare needs and family situations."}
- {"name":"Retirement Planning","description":"401(k) program with employer matching contributions to support long-term financial security and retirement planning."}
- {"name":"Unlimited Paid Time Off","description":"Flexible time-off policy allowing engineers to take vacation, personal days, and mental health days as needed while maintaining productivity."}
- {"name":"Professional Development","description":"Learning budget for conferences, courses, certifications, and training to support continuous skill development and career growth in emerging technologies."}
- {"name":"Equity and Stock Options","description":"Participation in company equity programs with stock option grants that align employee interests with long-term company success and growth."}
- {"name":"Remote Work Options","description":"Flexible work arrangements with options for remote work, allowing engineers to optimize their productivity and work-life balance."}
- {"name":"Wellness Programs","description":"Gym membership reimbursement, mental health resources, wellness coaching, and on-site fitness facilities to support holistic employee wellbeing."}
- {"name":"Parental Leave","description":"Generous parental leave policies supporting employees during family transitions and enabling work-life balance during major life events."}
- {"name":"Commuter Benefits","description":"Pre-tax commuter benefits and transportation support for employees in office locations reducing commute costs and environmental impact."}
- {"name":"Competitive Severance","description":"Fair severance packages and job transition support ensuring employee security in the event of organizational changes."}

## Compensation

- **max:** 280000
- **min:** 185000
- **currency:** USD
- **stockOptions:** true

## Interview process

### steps

## Full description
**About the Team**

The Ona team at OpenAI is helping build the software factory for the enterprise. We build infrastructure that enables AI agents to work in secure, customer-controlled cloud environments, with the context, tools, and controls they need to make progress across the software lifecycle—beyond a single developer’s laptop or active session.

Our focus is helping enterprises move from experimenting with agents to using them reliably in production. That means solving challenging problems in cloud environments, orchestration, security, and collaboration, while making the experience straightforward for the people directing and reviewing the work.

We’re a team that values initiative, close relationships with customers, and exceptional engineering craft. We take ownership, learn quickly, and communicate directly and kindly.  

**About the Role**

We’re hiring backend-focused Product Engineers across our platform and security product teams. You’ll build infrastructure and customer-facing workflows that let developers and AI agents work reliably in parallel.

You’ll work primarily in Go on APIs, complex networking, development environments, and orchestration for long-running tasks. You’ll own outcomes from understanding a user’s problem and choosing an approach through shipping, operating, and improving the solution, working closely with frontend, infrastructure, and security engineers.  

**In this role, you will:**

* Work directly with customers to build developer and security workflows, from getting a project running to investigating findings, reviewing agent-generated changes, and verifying fixes.
* Build Go services and APIs for provisioning cloud environments, running agents in customer infrastructure, and integrating with source control, CI, and other developer tools.
* Design reliable orchestration for long-running, parallel work, including durable state, retries, cancellation, and recovery.
* Build security into execution workflows through clear permissions, credential handling, isolation, and auditability.
* Own production quality: testing, safe rollouts, observability, performance, and operational reliability.
* Partner with frontend and design colleagues to make complex backend capabilities straightforward to use.

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

* Have strong Go skills and experience building and operating production backend systems.
* Understand distributed systems, concurrency, and state, and can reason about failures and recovery.
* Have practical experience with Linux, containers, cloud infrastructure, and networking, including routing, DNS, and secure connectivity.
* Can design clear APIs and data models that simplify complex workflows.
* Are product-minded and want to stay close to customers, understand their needs, and own solutions from problem discovery through launch and iteration.
* Communicate technical decisions clearly and work effectively across disciplines and locations.

Experience building on AWS, GCP, or Azure is a plus. Depth in one or more of developer platforms, workflow engines, Kubernetes, networking, sandboxing, identity systems, security products, or AI-agent workflows would be useful; we don’t expect expertise across all of them. Frontend experience is welcome 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. 

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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through [this form](https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA). No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this [link](https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241).

[OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf)

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.