Software Engineer, Backend - Sora

About the Team

The Sora team is pioneering multimodal capabilities for OpenAI’s foundation models. We’re a hybrid research and product team focused on integrating multimodal functionalities into our AI products, ensuring they are reliable, user-friendly, and aligned with our mission of broad societal benefit.

About the Role

We’re looking for experienced, problem-solving engineers to build new products and scale our systems. Our success depends on our ability to quickly iterate on products while also ensuring that they are performant and reliable.

You’ll work in a deeply iterative, collaborative, fast-paced environment to bring our technology to millions of users around the world, and ensure it’s delivered with safety and reliability in mind.

As we explore new frontiers in video-enabled AI and other modalities, you will help define our product strategy and build the foundations for these initiatives. We value engineers who take initiative, demonstrate strong product instincts, and maintain a user-centric focus in their work.

In this role, you will:

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design, build, and iterate on innovative video product features.

• Translate user needs and research insights into scalable product solutions.

• Work with researchers to integrate advanced video capabilities into our core offerings.

• Shape the technical roadmap and product strategy for our video initiatives.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 6+ years of industry experience in product engineering, with a proven record of shipping impactful, user-focused products.

• Excel in environments with ambiguity and rapid change, turning complex requirements into practical, elegant solutions.

• Possess a proactive mindset with the ability to quickly learn new technologies and share your insights with your team.

• Bonus: Have experience building or supporting video infrastructure, which will be valuable as our product scales.

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

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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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