Software Engineer, Agent Productivity

About this role

About the Team

OpenAI’s Application Engineering team builds the internal products and platforms that help OpenAI operate securely and at scale. We engineer, own, and evolve OpenAI’s core productivity ecosystem, creating secure applications, integrations, automation, and reusable tooling where off-the-shelf software is not enough. Our work spans employee-facing experiences and the services, APIs, control planes, and governance that make them reliable, permission-aware, and scalable.

We also act as a customer zero for OpenAI’s technology, building the enterprise foundations that let employees and agents safely access the context, tools, and actions they need. We partner closely with IT, Security, product teams, and platform providers to turn company-wide problems into durable systems, learn from real internal workflows, and help shape the products we deploy. We create paved paths that let teams move quickly without compromising security or operational quality.

About the Role

As a Staff Software Engineer on Agent Productivity, you will shape the foundation that enables teams to build agents with secure access to the context and capabilities they need. Slack will be the first and deepest implementation surface—and where you spend most of your time—owning its application architecture, integrations, APIs, governance, and administration automation while building patterns that extend to internal systems, identity platforms, and other enterprise applications.

This is a hands-on engineering role with broad organizational impact as agents support more employee workflows. You will define platform architecture, build reusable foundations, and establish secure patterns for identity, permissions, connectivity, and operations that make agents easier to develop, deploy, and manage.

In this role, you will:

- Own the technical strategy and architecture that enable teams to build, connect, and deploy agents quickly and safely, using Slack as the primary implementation surface.

- Design and build secure, reliable services that give agents permission-aware access to context, tools, and actions across Slack, internal systems, identity platforms, and enterprise applications.

- Establish scalable patterns for connectivity, context retrieval, authorization, and action execution across systems with different capabilities and constraints.

- Develop reusable SDKs, connectors, templates, testing tools, and deployment patterns that reduce integration effort and improve developer productivity.

- Build policy-aware automation and lifecycle management for agents, applications, and integrations, including ownership, permissions, approvals, credential rotation, and decommissioning.

- Implement governance and observability that enforce least privilege, protect user and workspace boundaries, and provide visibility into agent behavior, data access, and information sharing.

- Set operational standards for reliability, auditability, testing, incident response, and secure self-service.

- Partner accross IT, Security, Privacy, Legal, product teams, and platform providers to shape technical direction, influence roadmaps, and translate agent use cases into scalable systems.

You might thrive in this role if you:

- Deep hands-on software engineering experience and a track record of building and operating production systems at scale.

- Strong backend and distributed-systems fundamentals, including API design, integrations, and production reliability.

- Experience building developer platforms, reusable tooling, or shared services that make applications and agents easier to develop and deploy.

- Experience integrating enterprise platforms such as Slack and working through real-world API, identity, and operational constraints.

- Experience designing secure, permission-aware systems that access sensitive data or take actions on behalf of users.

- The ability to lead ambiguous technical initiatives across teams while balancing developer experience, security, and long-term architecture.

Bonus points if you have:

- Deep experience with Slack Enterprise Grid and its application, admin, audit, or discovery APIs.

- Experience building agent platforms or AI-assisted workflows that preserve user identity, permissions, attribution, and data boundaries.

- Experience building integrations or governance systems for Slack, Google Workspace, GitHub, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, or similar enterprise platforms.

- Familiarity with agent interoperability protocols such as MCP, or with data classification, DLP, retention, and compliance systems.

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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.

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

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