Applied AI Engineer, Enterprise - EDU

OpenAI’s Enterprise Applied AI Engineer serves as a hands-on technical partner to universities and other educational organizations, helping teams build durable production AI systems and scale adoption. The role combines end-to-end engineering with technical leadership across reliability, latency, cost, safety, security, governance, and operational readiness.

Role Focus

You will work directly with enterprise customers to turn ambitious AI use cases into production systems that deliver measurable business outcomes. Success is measured through sustained adoption and durable, reliable deployment in real operational environments.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, evaluate, and deploy AI systems from prototype to reliable production, enabling scaled adoption that addresses important customer problems and business goals.
• Partner with enterprise stakeholders to identify high-value opportunities and translate them into technical architectures, implementation plans, evaluation strategies, and success criteria.
• Make sound technical decisions across model selection, agent and tool design, retrieval and context design, data pipelines, evaluation, reliability, observability, latency, cost, safety, security, and governance.
• Diagnose complex implementation issues, reproduce failures, test hypotheses, and drive blockers to resolution.
• Collaborate closely with customers’ engineering teams and internal partners across Product, Research, Engineering, Security, and Go-to-Market to turn deployment experience into actionable product feedback.
• Create reusable architectures, tooling, playbooks, and technical guidance to accelerate future enterprise deployments.

Required Qualifications

• Personally designed, built, and shipped AI or machine-learning systems in enterprise environments, contributing substantially through coding, architecture, evaluation, debugging, or production engineering from prototype to production.
• Backgrounds may include applied AI or ML engineering, forward-deployed engineering, software engineering, customer engineering, solutions architecture, or technical consulting.
• Highly proficient in Python, with comfort working end to end across model APIs, agent and tool development, retrieval and data pipelines, evaluation, observability, integrations, and production operations.
• Ability to evaluate AI systems systematically using representative data, automated graders, production signals, and human judgment.
• Experience navigating enterprise production requirements, including reliability and cost.
• Capability to connect technical decisions to customer workflows, adoption, and measurable business outcomes.
• Clear and credible communication with hands-on engineers, technical leaders, security and product teams, and executives.
• Strong end-to-end ownership and technical judgment, with effectiveness in ambiguous environments.
• Ability to learn quickly, challenge assumptions constructively, and collaborate with humility.

Valued Experience

• Experience with JavaScript, TypeScript, or another relevant language.
• Experience working in education or research environments, including institutional data, privacy, access controls, and complex integrations.
• Experience working with education institutions, particularly universities (preferred but not required).
• Prior OpenAI product experience is not required.

Technologies

• Python
• JavaScript
• TypeScript

Compensation

• $251K–$278K + Offers Equity
• The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, and may include eligibility for performance-related bonus(es) and other compensation components as applicable.
• This role is at-will. OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
• 13+ paid company holidays, plus multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge
• Paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more as required by applicable state or local law)
• Mental health and wellness support
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend
• Daily meals in offices and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided

Team and Work Context

OpenAI works with cross-industry teams to navigate complex architectures, data environments, governance requirements, and organization-wide change. Lessons from these deployments are used to improve OpenAI products through reusable patterns that help customers move faster.

Location and Schedule

The role is based in San Francisco, CA with remote flexibility. Office-based employees follow a hybrid work model with three days per week in the office. This role may also be based in an office in New York City. Relocation assistance is offered to eligible employees.