Software Engineer, Applied Foundations - London

About the team

The Applied Foundations team at OpenAI is dedicated to ensuring that our cutting-edge technology is not only revolutionary, but also secure from a myriad of adversarial threats. We strive to maintain the integrity of our platforms as they scale. Our team is at the front lines of defending against financial abuse, scaled attacks, and other forms of misuse that could undermine the user experience or harm our operational stability

The Integrity pillar within Applied Foundations is responsible for the scaled systems that help identify and respond to bad actors and harm on OpenAI’s platforms. We are creating a 0→1 team in London to architect next-generation systems that will support, leverage, and scale the work of experts in harms committed with our technology.

In this role, you will:

• Design and build scaled foundational systems used in the detection, tracking, and enforcement of harm using our technologies.

• Work closely with and learn from technical and non-technical experts on harms we are observing, and that stem from our platforms, to inform your designs and implementation.

• Leverage OpenAI’s most advanced technologies to automate and augment our abilities to detect and reason about complex harms quickly, accurately, and with minimum human intervention.

• Collaborate with policy, trust and safety operations, legal, investigations, and harm-specialised engineers and data scientists to holistically combat abusive actors and customers using OpenAI’s technology.

• Stay abreast of the latest techniques and tools to stay several steps ahead of determined and well resourced adversaries.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have at least 5 years of software engineering experience in backend and data systems.

• Have at least 2 years experience in trust and safety analysis, investigation, and/or operations.

• Are excited to learn from top experts in the world on harms committed with AI, and to collaborate in an interdisciplinary team including technical and non-technical roles to combat these harms.

• Can dive into our codebase, intuit how it works, and be able to have a strong intuition for suggestions that will lead us to a stronger engineering position.

• Have a voracious and intrinsic desire to learn and fill in missing skills. An equally strong talent for sharing that information clearly and concisely with others

• Are comfortable with ambiguity and rapidly changing conditions. You view changes as an opportunity to add structure and order when necessary.

• Experience in Machine Learning techniques is a plus, 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.

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.

Compensation: USD 200,000 - 370,000 per year • Equity offered