{"id":3021929,"url":"https://alion.io/job/openai-principal-software-engineer-full-stack-codex","title":"Principal Software Engineer, Full Stack — Codex","company":{"id":2,"name":"OpenAI","domain":"openai.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/openai","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":78,"open_postings":191,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.869,"repost_share":0.005,"time_to_fill_p50_days":53,"computed_at":"2026-10-23T05:54:15Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":459000,"max":536000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":536000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI Codex","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-21T17:32:33Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-21","last_verified_at":"2026-10-23T22:48:06Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":2,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":2},"description":"About the Role\nWe’re hiring a Principal Software Engineer to help define and build the next generation of AI-powered software development workflows.\n“Full stack” in this role extends well beyond traditional frontend and backend development. You will set technical direction and lead major product initiatives spanning user interfaces, developer tooling, workflow orchestration, agent and prompt design, backend systems, and cloud infrastructure.\nThis is a highly product-oriented technical leadership role. You will identify the highest-leverage opportunities across the software development lifecycle, turn ambiguous user and technical problems into durable product and system strategies, and lead execution across multiple engineers and partner teams. Your work will shape both the architecture of Codex and how developers around the world design, write, review, test, and maintain software.\nYou will operate as a senior individual contributor: remaining deeply involved in design and implementation while raising the technical judgment, execution quality, and ambition of the broader team.\n\nIn this role, you will\nSet the technical and product direction for significant areas of Codex, translating an evolving product vision into scalable architectures and an actionable engineering strategy.\n\nLead complex, multi-quarter initiatives spanning client applications, backend services, agent systems, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling.\n\nDesign AI-powered workflows that generalize across languages, codebases, development environments, and organizations while remaining intuitive, reliable, and safe.\n\nMake high-consequence architectural decisions under ambiguity, balancing rapid product learning with long-term system quality and adaptability.\n\nIdentify opportunities that cut across existing team or product boundaries, align stakeholders around a direction, and drive the work from exploration through launch and iteration.\n\nPartner closely with product, design, research, infrastructure, security, and go-to-market teams to turn emerging model capabilities and developer needs into coherent product experiences.\n\nWork directly with developers, open-source maintainers, startups, and large enterprises to uncover unmet needs and distinguish foundational opportunities from incremental improvements.\n\nEstablish patterns and standards for reliability, observability, performance, experimentation, and evaluation across AI-powered developer workflows.\n\nServe as a technical multiplier by reviewing critical designs, mentoring engineers, improving engineering practices, and helping the team navigate its hardest product and technical decisions.\n\nContribute directly to implementation, particularly where the problem is novel, technically demanding, or requires connecting multiple layers of the product.\n\nYou might thrive in this role if you\nHave led the design and delivery of technically complex, user-facing systems with impact extending beyond a single feature or team.\n\nCombine deep software-engineering expertise with exceptional product judgment and can move fluently across product interfaces, distributed systems, infrastructure, and developer tooling.\n\nHave a track record of creating clarity in ambiguous problem spaces, setting a compelling technical direction, and bringing multiple teams or disciplines along with you.\n\nRemain hands-on while increasing the effectiveness of other engineers through architecture, mentorship, decision-making, and technical leadership.\n\nUnderstand modern software-development workflows deeply and can recognize where AI agents require fundamentally new interaction and system designs.\n\nHave experience building or operating AI-powered products and understand the challenges created by nondeterminism, evaluation, latency, reliability, safety, and rapidly evolving model capabilities.\n\nMake thoughtful tradeoffs between speed, product learning, technical quality, and long-term leverage.\n\nDevelop strong perspectives from user evidence while remaining willing to revise those perspectives as technology and user behavior evolve.\n\nCommunicate clearly across engineering, product, design, research, and executive audiences, especially when decisions involve substantial uncertainty or organizational complexity.\n\nAre energized by defining a problem as much as solving it-and by creating the technical and organizational conditions for others to deliver excellent work.\n\nAbout OpenAI\nOpenAI 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.\nWe 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.\nFor additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.\nBackground 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.\nTo notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.\nWe are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.\nOpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy\nAt 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6954,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Conversational AI","Generative Video","Code Intelligence"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-21T18:03:16Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 262 · green card filings: 3","filings_12m":262,"filings_prev_12m":114,"green_card_filings_12m":3,"median_offered_wage_usd":272217,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":127}],"liveness":{"score":63,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.632,"p_room":1,"age_days":1,"expected_fill_days":53,"reasons":["conf:1","stale_co","velocity","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-23T05:54:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":536000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/openai-principal-software-engineer-full-stack-codex","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/openai-principal-software-engineer-full-stack-codex.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-23T23:58:15Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":7739,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-24T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":2},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=2"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fopenai-principal-software-engineer-full-stack-codex"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fopenai-principal-software-engineer-full-stack-codex"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fopenai-principal-software-engineer-full-stack-codex"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/openai-principal-software-engineer-full-stack-codex\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fopenai-principal-software-engineer-full-stack-codex"}]}