Founding Software Engineer, Physical Engineering

About the Team

The Physical Engineering team sits within OpenAI’s Enterprise Verticals organization. We’re exploring how frontier AI can help people design, simulate, and build better physical products—shortening development cycles, improving product performance, and expanding what engineering teams can accomplish.

Our initial focus is on mechanical and electrical engineering. We’re building experiences within ChatGPT and integrations with engineering software to help engineers move from early concepts through design, simulation, and preparation for production.

We operate as a small founding team within OpenAI, working directly with customers and closely with research, design, and forward deployed engineers. We learn by building, putting products in users’ hands, and using their feedback to guide our next steps.

About the Role

As a Founding Full Stack Software Engineer, you’ll help define and build the product and technical foundations of this new vertical. You’ll work across frontend experiences, backend services, and integrations to bring AI into complex engineering workflows.

You’ll combine strong software engineering fundamentals with product judgment and an eye for intuitive user experiences. Working directly with engineers and design partners, you’ll identify valuable problems, prototype solutions, and develop them into reliable products.

We’re particularly interested in engineers who have built CAD, CAE, simulation, or other engineering design software. You should be comfortable owning work independently, making decisions with incomplete information, and moving between product details and system architecture.

This is an opportunity to shape a new product area from its earliest stages, with significant influence over what we build, how it works, and the team we become.

In this role, you will:

• Build and ship full-stack AI products that help mechanical and electrical engineers work through design and simulation tasks.

• Own projects from customer discovery and prototyping through production deployment and iteration.

• Create intuitive interfaces that help users understand, inspect, and refine complex engineering outputs.

• Develop backend services, APIs, plugins, and integrations that connect OpenAI models with engineering software.

• Work directly with customers to understand engineering constraints, identify valuable applications, and translate specific needs into broadly useful products.

• Partner with research, design, platform, and forward deployed engineering teams to bring emerging AI capabilities into practical workflows.

• Evaluate quality and reliability, using customer feedback and product evidence to understand whether we’re improving how engineers work.

• Help establish the technical foundations and engineering practices of a growing team.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have independently built and shipped substantial software products, with ownership across frontend and backend systems.

• Bring strong product instincts and UI judgment, especially for tools that make complex work easier to understand and perform.

• Enjoy working directly with users and translating their needs into thoughtful product and technical decisions.

• Can turn an ambiguous opportunity into a clear starting point and a working product.

• Move quickly, make pragmatic tradeoffs, and stay accountable for quality after launch.

• Learn unfamiliar tools and domains quickly and communicate clearly across disciplines.

• Are excited about applying frontier AI to the design and development of physical products.

Particularly relevant experience

• Building CAD, CAE, simulation, electrical design, or related professional software.

• Developing interactive tools for visual, spatial, or technically complex workflows.

• Connecting engineering tools through APIs, plugins, or extensions.

• Building AI-powered applications and evaluating their usefulness and reliability.

• Taking a product from concept to production as a founder or early engineer.

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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