This listing pays about $264,500 a year. Across 66 open applied ai engineer listings that state pay, the middle half runs $178,000 to $256,000 and the median is $214,000. That is 24% above the median, above the middle half of those listings.

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About the job

ABOUT THE TEAM

Across industries, OpenAI’s Applied AI Engineering (AIE) team helps organizations turn frontier AI into safe, reliable production systems that deliver meaningful business outcomes. We work directly with customers’ engineering, product, security, and transformation teams to navigate complex architectures, data environments, governance requirements, and organization-wide change. We turn lessons from these deployments into better OpenAI products and reusable patterns that help customers move faster.

ABOUT THE ROLE

As an Enterprise AIE, you will serve as a technical partner to leading organizations including universities and other educational institutions, helping them turn ambitious AI use cases into durable production systems and adoption at scale. You will combine deep technical judgment with hands-on engineering to provide technical leadership on complex customer deployments. You will write and debug code, build evaluation systems, resolve complex integrations, and guide decisions about model behavior, reliability, latency, cost, safety, security, governance, and operational readiness. Success is measured by durable production systems, sustained adoption, and meaningful business impact. Your deployment experience will also directly influence how OpenAI’s products evolve.

This role may be based in one of our offices in New York City or San Francisco, or it may be performed remotely. Office-based employees follow a hybrid work model with three days per week in the office. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.

IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL

- Work hands-on in code to design, build, evaluate, and deploy AI systems from prototype to reliable production and scaled adoption that solve important customer problems and deliver measurable business outcomes.

- Partner with enterprise customers 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, context design, data pipelines, evaluation, reliability, observability, latency, cost, safety, security, and governance.

- Diagnose complex implementation challenges, reproduce failures, test hypotheses, and drive blockers to resolution.

- Partner closely with customers’ engineering teams and OpenAI’s Product, Research, Engineering, Security, and Go-to-Market teams to turn deployment experience into actionable product feedback.

- Create reusable architectures, tooling, playbooks, and technical guidance that accelerate future enterprise deployments.

YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU

- Have personally designed, built, and shipped AI or machine-learning systems in enterprise environments, taking them from prototype to production and making substantial contributions through coding, architecture, evaluation, debugging, or production engineering. Relevant backgrounds may include applied AI or ML engineering, forward-deployed engineering, software engineering, customer engineering, solutions architecture, or technical consulting.

- Are highly proficient in Python and comfortable working end to end across model APIs, agent and tool development, retrieval and data pipelines, evaluation, observability, integrations, and production operations. Experience with JavaScript, TypeScript, or another relevant language is valuable.

- Know how to evaluate AI systems systematically using representative data, automated graders, production signals, and human judgment.

- Have navigated enterprise production requirements, including integrations, reliability, observability, security, privacy, data governance, performance, and cost.

- Experience navigating education or research environments, including institutional data, privacy, access controls and complex integrations, is valuable.

- Can connect technical decisions to customer workflows, adoption, and measurable business outcomes.

- Communicate clearly and credibly with hands-on engineers, technical leaders, security and product teams, and executives.

- Take end-to-end ownership, exercise strong technical judgment, and move effectively through ambiguity.

- Learn quickly, challenge assumptions constructively, and collaborate with humility. Experience working with education institutions, particularly universities, is preferred but not required. Prior OpenAI product experience is 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.