Applied AI Engineer, API Platform, Digital Natives

About the role

About the team

The Applied AI Engineering team is responsible for ensuring the safe and effective deployment of generative AI applications for developers and enterprises. We act as a trusted advisor and thought partner for our API customers, working to build an effective backlog of frontier AI use cases for their industry and drive them to production through strong technical guidance.

As an Applied AI Engineer in the Digital Native segment, you’ll work with industry-leading technology companies like Stripe, Uber, and Reddit to bring new AI capabilities into the products their customers use every day. You’ll partner directly with experienced product and engineering teams to turn frontier model capabilities into new features and agentic experiences. The work combines rapid experimentation with the demands of established products: complex systems, real users, and high expectations for quality and performance. Lessons from these deployments inform OpenAI’s product and research teams.

About the role

You will combine deep technical judgment, hands-on engineering, and customer leadership to take ambitious ideas from use-case selection and architecture through prototyping, evaluation, production launch, and scale. You will write and debug code, build evaluation systems, resolve complex integrations, and guide decisions involving model behavior, reliability, latency, cost, safety, security, governance, and operational readiness. Success is measured by production systems, sustained adoption, and meaningful customer impact – not simply activity or successful demonstrations. This is a rare opportunity to work on consequential real-world deployments at the frontier of AI while directly influencing how OpenAI’s products evolve.

This role is based in our NYC office. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

- Deeply embed with our most sophisticated and technical platform customers, serving as their technical thought partner in ideating and building novel applications on our API.

- Forge relationships with CTOs, AI Product and engineering leaders to ensure their application’s successful deployment at scale.

- Proactively provide guidance to our customers on how to maximize business impact from their applications, accelerating their time to value.

- Build targeted prototypes, pilots, and model evaluations with customer teams to test product ideas, guide architecture decisions, and inform their product roadmaps.

- Collaborate with our Product and Research teams in validating upcoming frontier AI capabilities in customer environments, and deliver high-signal feedback to steer OpenAI’s roadmap.

- Scale the Applied AI Engineer function through sharing knowledge and publishing best-practices to our internal and external repositories.

- Evaluate emerging model capabilities, developer tools, and implementation patterns, and translate relevant advances into practical recommendations for customer applications.