Fullstack Software Engineer, Child Safety Tools & Systems

About the Team

The Intelligence & Investigations Engineering team builds systems that detect, analyze, and disrupt abuse across OpenAI's products. We partner closely with the Child Safety team and cross-functional groups to protect users while advancing OpenAI's goal of developing AI that benefits everyone.

About the Role

As a Fullstack Engineer focused on child safety, you'll build data-intensive, AI-powered applications and infrastructure that enable operators and investigators to work effectively and responsibly. You'll adapt quickly in ambiguous, fast-moving environments to deliver well-crafted, reliable tooling for high-severity safety work.

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.

Candidates should understand this role involves exposure to sensitive and egregious content.

In this role, you will:

• 4+ years of experience as a software engineer
• Prototype, build, and maintain intelligence systems that detect, triage, and enable efficient human review of possible high severity harm
• Work hand in hand with operators and investigators, designing and delivering systems that enable them to do their work faster, more accurately, and more safely.
• Develop across the stack: UIs, services, pipelines, and anything else required to solve the problems we face.
• Interact with partners across Product Policy, Platform Integrity, Safety Systems, and Research
• Contribute to the team's technical strategy, especially for child safety related tools and systems
• Report on impact in a data-driven fashion

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have a strong software engineering foundation and enjoy owning systems end-to-end—from infrastructure and data ingestion to frontend tooling
• Are energized by working at the frontier of AI capabilities, integrating new models and APIs into practical systems
• Have experience building and operating large-scale data pipelines or search/retrieval systems
• Are proficient in Python and/or TypeScript, and familiar with tools like Spark, Kafka, Flink, data warehouses, and SQL
• Take a product-minded approach, design with user workflows in mind, and iterate quickly based on feedback
• Favor pragmatic solutions and can ship in hacky, low-support environments when needed
• Are comfortable navigating ambiguity and open-ended problem spaces with evolving goals
• Have prior experience working on engineering for high-severity harms
• Bring intuition for the pain points and workflows of operations and investigative teams, and curiosity about solving complex investigations
• Bonus: prior knowledge of child-safety-specific challenges such as secure handling of quarantined content and reporting to NCMEC