About the Team

The Incubation team explores and develops new product ideas at their earliest stages — identifying opportunities, rapidly testing concepts, and building the foundations for future OpenAI products. Operating as a 0→1 innovation group, the team works across problem spaces to discover where advances in AI can unlock entirely new user experiences.

We operate with a startup-like mindset inside OpenAI: small teams, fast iteration cycles, and a willingness to explore bold ideas, learn quickly, and pivot based on real-world signals. Our goal is to turn promising concepts into validated products that can scale to global impact.

About the Role

As a Full-Stack Software Engineer on the Incubation team, you’ll help imagine, prototype, and build entirely new product experiences within the OpenAI ecosystem. This team moves quickly from idea to experiment to iteration, exploring multiple directions in parallel and investing deeply in the most promising opportunities.

You’ll work across the stack—building frontend and backend systems, developing rapid prototypes, and collaborating closely with designers, researchers, and product partners—to bring early-stage ideas to life. This includes developing production systems on top of the high-scale internal platforms that power ChatGPT and the OpenAI API, as well as designing new architectures when existing systems aren’t sufficient.

We’re looking for engineers who thrive in small, nimble teams, bring creative product instincts, and pair strong execution with sound technical judgment. You should be comfortable operating in ambiguity, learning from experiments, and helping shape both product direction and technical strategy from the ground up.

In this role, you will:

• Prototype and iterate quickly on new product ideas, exploring how AI can unlock novel user experiences and workflows.

• Turn early concepts into functional demos and ship code early and often, using real-world feedback to guide iteration.

• Validate ideas through experimentation and help scale the strongest concepts from prototype to production.

• Work across the full stack to build products from initial exploration through launch readiness.

• Collaborate closely with research, product, design, data science, and engineering partners to drive meaningful impact.

• Learn from and contribute alongside deeply experienced engineers while fostering a high-trust, inclusive, and candid team culture.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 3+ years of professional software engineering experience.

• Have built and shipped full-stack apps end-to-end — from prototype to traction — in fast-moving, startup-like environments.

• Are energized by ambiguity — you can take a one-sentence idea and turn it into a working product.

• Jump at opportunities to learn new systems or languages and share your insights clearly with others.

• Enjoy exploring new problem spaces and shaping products before requirements are fully defined.

• Thrive in high-ambiguity environments and can independently translate broad ideas into shipped products.

• Welcome direct, constructive feedback and offer the same to others with clarity and respect.

• Are fluent across multiple programming languages and frameworks — choosing the right tools to move quickly and effectively.

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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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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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.