# Software Engineer, Plugin Ecosystem **Company:** [OpenAI](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/openai) Join OpenAI's Plugin Ecosystem team to architect and deliver scalable systems that enable millions of users to extend ChatGPT and Codex through plugins and integrations. This role combines backend engineering, product development, and applied AI expertise to design intuitive developer experiences, build reliable plugin infrastructure, and improve how advanced language models interact with external tools and data sources. You'll own end-to-end problems spanning API design, identity and permissions systems, plugin quality optimization, and cross-functional collaboration with research and security teams. **Role:** Backend Engineer **Seniority:** Mid **Locations:** San Francisco **Salary:** 185000–490000 USD [Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/e42305bf-2266-4dff-82ad-42be7ddac495) Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/openai/software-engineer-plugin-ecosystem --- ## Responsibilities - Design and Ship Production APIs and SDKs: Architect and deliver RESTful and gRPC APIs, software development kits (SDKs), and backend services that empower external developers to build, integrate, and extend plugins for ChatGPT and Codex platforms. Establish API standards, versioning strategies, and backward compatibility patterns that support rapid developer onboarding and long-term platform scalability. - Build Intuitive Plugin Discovery and Installation Experiences: Create user-facing interfaces and backend systems that streamline plugin discovery, installation, configuration, and management workflows. Implement search, filtering, recommendation algorithms, and intuitive UI patterns that reduce friction and increase plugin adoption across the user base. - Implement Plugin Lifecycle Management Infrastructure: Build comprehensive systems supporting the complete plugin lifecycle including creation, local testing, publishing, versioning, updates, and deprecation. Develop tooling and documentation that make it straightforward for developers to manage plugin releases and handle breaking changes responsibly. - Optimize Model-Plugin Interactions and Quality: Collaborate with AI research teams to diagnose and improve how language models select, invoke, and execute plugins to complete user tasks. Implement telemetry, logging, and evaluation frameworks that measure plugin interaction quality, identify failure patterns, and drive continuous improvement as models evolve. - Enhance Plugin Reliability and Error Handling: Engineer robust error detection, recovery mechanisms, and user-friendly error messaging across ChatGPT, Codex, and interactive app environments. Implement circuit breakers, retry logic, fallback strategies, and observability instrumentation to ensure plugins fail gracefully and transparently. - Build Permission, Authorization, and Admin Control Systems: Design and implement fine-grained permissions models, audit logging, approval workflows, and administrative controls that enable organizations and individuals to adopt plugins confidently. Ensure compliance with security requirements and give admins the necessary controls for plugin governance and data protection. - Gather Developer Feedback and Drive Platform Improvements: Actively engage with plugin developers and end users to understand pain points, recurring technical challenges, and feature gaps. Translate qualitative feedback into actionable product and platform enhancements, documentation improvements, and tooling refinements that reduce developer friction. - Cross-Functional Collaboration on Infrastructure and Safety: Coordinate with engineering, product, research, security, and trust & safety teams to scale plugin infrastructure, enforce security policies, prevent abuse, and deliver safe, auditable, and reliable plugin execution at platform scale. ## Requirements ### education - {"name":"Computer Science or Related Field","description":"Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience demonstrating proficiency with algorithms, data structures, and software design principles."} ### technical - {"name":"Backend Systems Architecture","description":"Strong foundation designing and implementing scalable, distributed backend systems that handle high throughput and low latency. Experience with microservices architecture, system design tradeoffs, and building platforms that support complex integrations."} - {"name":"API Design and Development","description":"Demonstrated expertise designing intuitive, well-documented APIs (REST, gRPC, GraphQL) that developers enjoy using. Understanding of API versioning strategies, rate limiting, pagination, error handling, and SDKs for multiple programming languages."} - {"name":"Identity, Authorization, and Permissions Systems","description":"Professional experience building or operating identity management, OAuth/OpenID Connect flows, role-based access control (RBAC), or attribute-based access control (ABAC) systems. Experience securing integrations between systems and managing API keys or token lifecycle."} - {"name":"Web Backend and Database Technologies","description":"Proficiency with modern backend frameworks and databases. Comfortable working across full-stack contexts, from relational databases and caching layers to async task processing and message queues. Experience optimizing database queries and implementing efficient data models for complex use cases."} - {"name":"Observability, Monitoring, and Debugging","description":"Practical expertise implementing logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting for production systems. Ability to diagnose production issues, correlate signals across systems, and use observability data to drive performance improvements and reliability enhancements."} ### experience - {"name":"Backend or Full-Stack Software Engineering","description":"4+ years of professional experience building production software systems, with at least 2+ years focused on backend infrastructure, APIs, or platform development. Track record of shipping features from design through production deployment and maintenance."} - {"name":"Developer-Facing Systems or Platforms","description":"Demonstrated experience building products other developers actively use, such as public or internal APIs, software development kits (SDKs), developer platforms, open-source projects with active communities, or developer-focused tooling. Understanding of developer experience (DX) principles and the ability to empathize with developer pain points."} - {"name":"Applied AI and Model Integration Experience","description":"Valuable experience integrating machine learning models or language models into production systems, diagnosing model-system interactions, measuring quality metrics, and iterating on reliability. Familiarity with prompt engineering, function calling, or tool use in language model applications."} - {"name":"Large-Scale Integration Engineering","description":"Experience working on connector or integration-heavy systems that orchestrate data and function calling across multiple external services, APIs, and platforms. Comfort managing versioning, compatibility, and reliability challenges in tightly coupled or decoupled architectures."} ## Skills ### required - {"name":"Backend Engineering and System Design","description":"Design patterns, scalability fundamentals, database modeling, caching strategies, async processing, and ability to make principled tradeoffs between consistency, availability, and performance."} - {"name":"API Design and REST/gRPC Fundamentals","description":"Ability to design clean, intuitive APIs with clear contracts, thoughtful error responses, and developer-friendly documentation. Understanding of authentication, rate limiting, and versioning strategies."} - {"name":"Production Debugging and Observability","description":"Proficiency using logging, metrics, distributed tracing, and monitoring tools to diagnose issues, trace requests through distributed systems, and identify performance bottlenecks in production environments."} - {"name":"SQL and Relational Databases","description":"Strong SQL query writing skills, index optimization, query planning, schema design, and understanding of transaction semantics, ACID properties, and when to denormalize data."} - {"name":"Identity and Permissions Modeling","description":"Ability to think through access control requirements, design permission models that scale, and implement secure authentication and authorization flows that prevent unauthorized access."} - {"name":"Cross-Team Collaboration and Communication","description":"Ability to write clear design documents, articulate technical tradeoffs, gather requirements from non-technical stakeholders, and coordinate across product, research, security, and engineering teams."} ### preferred - {"name":"TypeScript or Python","description":"Professional proficiency in TypeScript for Node.js backends or Python for backend services, data processing, or API development. Familiarity with modern frameworks and async programming patterns."} - {"name":"Cloud Infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure)","description":"Hands-on experience deploying and operating applications on cloud platforms. Familiarity with managed services (databases, queues, observability), infrastructure as code, and containerization with Docker or Kubernetes."} - {"name":"Message Queues and Event-Driven Architecture","description":"Experience designing systems with message brokers (RabbitMQ, Kafka, Google Cloud Pub/Sub) or event streaming patterns for asynchronous, loosely coupled architectures."} - {"name":"GraphQL and Advanced API Patterns","description":"Experience designing or consuming GraphQL APIs, understanding query complexity optimization, and familiarity with webhook patterns or real-time synchronization mechanisms."} - {"name":"AI and Machine Learning Model Integration","description":"Experience working with machine learning frameworks, orchestrating model inference, implementing prompt engineering pipelines, or building systems that interact with language model APIs."} - {"name":"Security Engineering Fundamentals","description":"Understanding of security principles relevant to SaaS platforms including data encryption, audit logging, access control compliance, API key management, and secure secret storage."} - {"name":"Testing Frameworks and Reliability Engineering","description":"Proficiency writing unit, integration, and end-to-end tests. Familiarity with chaos engineering, canary deployments, feature flags, and practices that enable safe, iterative releases."} ## Tech stack ### tools - {"name":"Kubernetes / Docker","description":"Container orchestration and deployment infrastructure enabling reliable, scalable deployment of plugin services and infrastructure components."} - {"name":"GitHub","description":"Version control, code review, and CI/CD pipeline management for coordinating development across the plugin ecosystem team."} - {"name":"Datadog / New Relic / Prometheus","description":"Observability stack for monitoring system health, tracing distributed requests, alerting on anomalies, and debugging production issues at scale."} - {"name":"Git / GitOps","description":"Infrastructure as code versioning and deployment automation enabling repeatable, auditable infrastructure changes across environments."} ### others - {"name":"OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect","description":"Industry-standard protocols for authentication and authorization, critical for secure plugin access, developer identity, and user consent flows."} - {"name":"Protocol Buffers / GraphQL","description":"Data serialization and query language technologies enabling efficient API contracts between services and client applications."} - {"name":"Model Context Protocol (MCP)","description":"OpenAI's emerging open standard for plugin interactions and tool use, representing the future of how models interact with external systems and data."} - {"name":"REST API Standards and Best Practices","description":"Adherence to RESTful principles, semantic HTTP status codes, HATEOAS, content negotiation, and industry standards ensuring API consistency and developer usability."} - {"name":"Webhook and Event-Driven Systems","description":"Asynchronous communication patterns enabling plugins to react to events, propagate state changes, and maintain eventual consistency across distributed systems."} ### databases - {"name":"PostgreSQL","description":"Primary relational database for transactional data, identity management, permissions, and audit logging with strong ACID guarantees."} - {"name":"Redis","description":"In-memory data store for caching, sessions, rate limiting, and real-time data structures supporting high-throughput plugin operations."} - {"name":"DynamoDB or similar NoSQL","description":"Potential NoSQL option for high-scale, flexible schema requirements such as plugin metadata, usage telemetry, or configuration storage."} ### languages - {"name":"TypeScript","description":"Primary language for Node.js backend services, providing type safety and scalable application development at OpenAI scale."} - {"name":"Python","description":"Used for backend services, data processing pipelines, machine learning integration, and infrastructure automation across the plugin ecosystem platform."} - {"name":"Go","description":"Potential language choice for high-performance microservices, particularly for services requiring concurrency, low latency, and efficient resource utilization."} ### frameworks - {"name":"Node.js / Express or Fastify","description":"Backend framework for building RESTful APIs and microservices that power the plugin platform, SDK generation, and developer-facing endpoints."} - {"name":"FastAPI or Django","description":"Python frameworks used for rapid API development, async request handling, and integration with AI/ML systems for plugin quality optimization."} - {"name":"gRPC","description":"High-performance framework for inter-service communication, enabling low-latency connections between plugin infrastructure components."} ## Benefits ### benefits - {"name":"Equity Compensation","description":"Significant stock options grants aligned with company growth, providing long-term upside and shared ownership in OpenAI's mission and success."} - {"name":"Comprehensive Health and Wellness Coverage","description":"Competitive health insurance including medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and your family, plus mental health and wellness benefits supporting work-life balance."} - {"name":"Retirement and Financial Planning","description":"401(k) retirement plan with employer matching contributions and access to financial planning resources to support long-term wealth building."} - {"name":"Flexible Time Off and Paid Leave","description":"Generous paid time off policy, parental leave, and paid sabbaticals supporting rest, family time, and personal development alongside career growth."} - {"name":"Professional Development and Learning","description":"Support for conferences, training programs, technical certifications, and ongoing education to keep skills current in rapidly evolving AI and infrastructure domains."} - {"name":"Relocation Assistance","description":"Comprehensive relocation support for new employees joining OpenAI in San Francisco, including moving assistance, temporary housing, and transition support."} - {"name":"Hybrid Work Model","description":"3 days per week in the San Francisco office with flexibility for remote work, balancing collaboration with focused deep work on complex technical problems."} - {"name":"Commuter and Transportation Benefits","description":"Subsidized commute options including transit passes and parking, reducing commuting costs and supporting sustainable transportation choices."} - {"name":"On-Site Amenities","description":"Modern office facilities in San Francisco with collaborative spaces, wellness facilities, and convenient access to restaurants and services supporting daily work needs."} ## Compensation - **max:** 320000 - **min:** 180000 - **currency:** USD - **stockOptions:** true ## Interview process ### steps ## Full description **About the Team** The Plugin Ecosystem team builds the platform and product experiences that let people extend ChatGPT and Codex. We work on plugins, skills, connectors, interactive apps, and open standards like the Model Context Protocol (MCP). We make plugins easy to discover, install, and use, ensure they’re invoked at the right time, and help people find new ways to get value from them. We want anyone to be able to turn a useful workflow into a plugin, share it, and have other people use it. A plugin can package instructions and skills with connections to the tools and data it needs. Our work spans creation and publishing, reliable execution across our products, clear permissions and approvals, and the controls admins need to bring plugins to their organizations. We work closely with research to improve plugin quality as models evolve. **About the Role** We’re looking for product-minded engineers to build the systems behind plugins and improve how models use them. Depending on your focus, you may scale generalist infrastructure and identity-related integrations across products, or improve plugin quality at the intersection of backend engineering and applied AI or work on the product experience itself to drive plugin usage. You’ll work across teams and own problems from diagnosis and design through implementation and release. This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. **In this role, you will:** * Design and ship APIs, SDKs, and services that developers use to extend ChatGPT and Codex. * Build intuitive experiences that help users discover, install, and use plugins to get more done. * Make plugins easier to create, test, publish, update, and share. * Improve when and how models use plugins, from choosing the right plugin to completing a task. Work with Research to diagnose failures and measure improvements as models evolve. * Improve plugin reliability and interaction quality across ChatGPT and Codex, including interactive apps, with clear error messages and recovery paths. * Build consistent permissions, approvals, and admin controls that help individuals and organizations confidently adopt plugins. * Work with developers and partners to turn recurring problems into improvements to the platform, tooling, and documentation. * Collaborate across engineering, Product, Research, Security, and Trust & Safety to scale plugin infrastructure and deliver safe, reliable execution. **You might thrive int his role if you:** * Care about product quality and can make complex capabilities feel intuitive, from discovering a useful plugin to completing a task with it. * Have strong opinions about APIs and abstractions, and can explain the tradeoffs behind your decisions. Experience with identity, permissions, or integration-heavy systems is especially valuable. * Enjoy talking with users and developers, understanding what they’re trying to accomplish, and turning recurring problems into product and platform improvements. * Can move between product questions and technical details, collaborate across teams, and take an ambiguous problem through to production. * Are comfortable working across web interfaces and backend systems. Experience building applied AI systems, diagnosing model–tool interactions, and measuring reliability and quality is especially valuable. * Have built products people rely on or software that other developers use, such as an API or SDK, an open-source project, a developer platform, or internal tools with real users. **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.