Principal Software Engineer, Full Stack — Codex
OpenAI · San Francisco
About this role
## About the Role We’re hiring a **Principal Software Engineer** to help define and build the next generation of **AI-powered software development workflows**. In this **Full Stack** role, you’ll go well beyond traditional frontend and backend development. You’ll set technical direction and lead major product initiatives spanning **user interfaces, developer tooling, workflow orchestration, agent and prompt design, backend systems, and cloud infrastructure**. This is a **highly product-oriented technical leadership** role. You’ll 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. You’ll shape both the architecture of **Codex** and how developers around the world **design, write, review, test, and maintain software**. You 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. --- ## What You’ll Do - Set the **technical and product direction** for significant areas of Codex, translating an evolving product vision into scalable architectures and an actionable engineering strategy. - Lead **complex, multi-quarter initiatives** across client applications, backend services, agent systems, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling. - Design **AI-powered workflows** that generalize across languages, codebases, development environments, and organizations—while remaining **intuitive, reliable, and safe**. - Make **high-consequence architectural decisions** under ambiguity, balancing rapid product learning with long-term system quality and adaptability. - Identify cross-boundary opportunities, align stakeholders, and drive work from **exploration through launch and iteration**. - Partner closely with **product, design, research, infrastructure, security, and go-to-market** teams to turn emerging model capabilities and developer needs into coherent product experiences. - Work directly with **developers, open-source maintainers, startups, and large enterprises** to uncover unmet needs and distinguish foundational opportunities from incremental improvements. - Establish patterns and standards for **reliability, observability, performance, experimentation, and evaluation** across AI-powered developer workflows. - Serve as a **technical multiplier**: review critical designs, mentor engineers, improve engineering practices, and help the team navigate its hardest product and technical decisions. - Contribute directly to implementation, especially where the problem is novel, technically demanding, or requires connecting multiple layers of the product. --- ## You Might Thrive If You - Have led the design and delivery of **technically complex, user-facing systems** with impact beyond a single feature or team. - Combine deep software-engineering expertise with **exceptional product judgment**, moving fluently across product interfaces, distributed systems, infrastructure, and developer tooling. - Have a track record of creating clarity in ambiguous problem spaces, setting compelling technical direction, and bringing multiple teams/disciplines along. - Remain **hands-on** while increasing other engineers’ effectiveness through architecture, mentorship, decision-making, and technical leadership. - Understand modern software-de
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