Who Are We? Postman is the world’s leading API platform, used by more than 45 million+ developers and 500,000 organizations, including 98% of the Fortune 500. Postman is helping developers and professionals across the globe build the API-first world by simplifying each step of the API lifecycle and streamlining collaboration—enabling users to create better APIs, faster. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Boston, New York, Austin, Tokyo, London, and Bangalore - where Postman was founded. Postman is privately held, with funding from Battery Ventures, BOND, Coatue, CRV, Insight Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners. Learn more at postman.com or connect with Postman on X via @getpostman. P.S: We highly recommend reading The "API-First World" graphic novel to understand the bigger picture and our vision at Postman. The Opportunity As an Applied Scientist specializing in Small Language Models and AI Training, you will lead research and development efforts focused on building efficient, high-performance language models tailored for practical applications. You will work closely with research, engineering, and product teams to advance model training techniques, optimize architectures, and scale AI solutions. Your work will directly contribute to AI systems that are safe, interpretable, and impactful across diverse usage scenarios. What You’ll Do Lead research and development of novel training methodologies and architectures for small and efficient language models. Design, implement, and evaluate model training experiments to improve performance, robustness, and generalization of language models. Collaborate closely with research scientists and engineers on scalable training pipelines and model deployment strategies. Develop techniques for model compression, fine-tuning, and domain adaptation to optimize models for real-world applications. Ensure AI safety, fairness, and alignment principles are integrated into model training processes and evaluat
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Ai Systems Research And Development Engineer in San Francisco
15 active opportunities · Updated September 2026
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Explore current ai systems research and development engineer jobs in San Francisco. Filter by work mode, employment type, experience, department, date posted and distance.
About the Team Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. Working across the entire model stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the constraints of physical systems to improve people's lives. About the Role We are seeking a lead thermal simulation engineer to help accelerate the design and development of next-generation robotic systems through modeling, simulation, and analysis. You will work closely with mechanical, electrical, controls, and robotics engineers to evaluate designs before hardware is built, identify risks early, and guide critical architecture decisions. This role spans structural and thermal analysis and design across robotic subsystems including actuators, mechanisms, structures, electronics, and integrated systems. You will develop simulation workflows that improve engineering velocity, increase confidence in design decisions, and help us build more capable, reliable, and manufacturable robotic platforms. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. This role will be expected to be in office 4 days per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Perform thermal simulations to assess heat generation, cooling strategies, thermal interfaces, and system-level thermal performance Partner with mechanical, electrical, and controls engineers to influence design decisions early in development Build simulation models to evaluate robotic actuators, transmissions, mechanisms, structures, soft goods, and integrated assemblies Correlate simulation results with physical testing and develop methodologies to improve model accuracy Support architecture trade studies by evaluating design concepts before hardware is built Develop simulation workflows, standards, and best practices that scale across the robotics o
About the Team The Applied Engineering team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to consumers and businesses. You’ll join the team responsible for running the core infrastructure that supports products like ChatGPT and the API. The systems we support include our kubernetes clusters, infrastructure deployment, our networking stack, cloud abstractions, and more. We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth. About the Role The cloud infrastructure team builds and maintains infrastructure abstractions allowing OpenAI to ship products quickly and scalably. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. In this role, you will: Design and build the development and production platforms that power our products, enabling reliability and security at scale Ensure our infrastructure can scale to the next order of magnitude Help create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture that makes all feel welcome while enabling radical candor and the challenging of group think Like all other teams, we are responsible for the reliability of the systems we build. This includes an on-call rotation to respond to critical incidents as needed. You might thrive in this role if you: Have 5+ years building core infrastructure Have experience operating orchestration systems such as Kubernetes at scale Have experience building abstractions over cloud platforms Take pride in building and operating scalable, reliable, secure systems Are comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change This role is exclusively based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees. 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 depl
About the Team We’re hiring Software Engineers to join our broader Infrastructure organization, which supports multiple high-impact teams. Depending on your interests and experience, you could work on one of several focus areas—including Core Distributed Systems, Reliability Engineering, Observability, Developer Productivity or Cloud Infrastructure. About the Role All teams are deeply collaborative, work on mission-critical services, and are responsible for building distributed, scalable infrastructure to bring OpenAI’s technology to the world through products like ChatGPT and the OpenAI API. You’ll work closely with stakeholders to understand infrastructure, data and compute needs, setting the technical strategy that supports cutting-edge research and product development. This is a critical role for someone who is passionate about solving complex engineering problems at scale, ensuring their performance, scalability and reliability Team Focus Areas Distributed Systems: Owning and building important, highly scalable, available, performant, and reliable distributed systems (and their building blocks) to power the entire stack at OpenAI Systems Engineering: Work across layers of the stack—debugging system bottlenecks, evolving core infrastructure, and solving novel problems in performance and scalability. Reliability Engineering: Build scalable, fault-tolerant systems and lead efforts around service health, incident response, and resilience. Observability: Design and maintain observability tooling (metrics, logs, tracing) to give teams visibility into production systems at scale. Developer Productivity: Create tools, environments, and workflows that help engineers ship high-quality software faster and more safely. Cloud Infrastructure: Own the cloud-native infrastructure (compute, networking, storage) that underpins all services and research workloads. Databases: Building high performance, distributed database systems that power all of OpenAI's product stack. In this
About the Team The Human Data team at OpenAI is responsible for identifying and mitigating risks in advanced AI systems by designing evaluations, surfacing vulnerabilities, and collaborating closely with researchers to strengthen model reliability and public trust. About the Role As a Research Program Manager, you will lead initiatives that test the safety and robustness of OpenAI’s models through creative experimentation and structured evaluation. You’ll coordinate efforts across research and engineering teams to transform ambiguous risks into concrete research programs and influence future model development and deployment. We’re looking for people who are technically savvy, comfortable with ambiguity, and excited about shaping the future of safe AI. 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. In this role, you will: Lead programs that explore unexpected model behaviors and identify failure modes. Translate vague or emergent risk signals into clear priorities and actionable research plans. Design and run creative evaluations, experiments, and red-teaming campaigns. Collaborate with research, product, and deployment teams to integrate findings into model training and deployment cycles. Develop repeatable systems for tracking model performance and understanding emerging behavior patterns. You might thrive in this role if you: Have strong experience in technical program management, with excellent organizational and communication skills. Are familiar with large language models, prompt engineering, or model evaluation techniques. Are comfortable managing fast-paced, high-uncertainty projects and shaping them from the ground up. Are creative and resourceful in devising new methods for testing model behavior and performance. Can effectively coordinate across technical and non-technical stakeholders to drive alignment and execution. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI resear
About the team OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team turns research breakthroughs into production-grade systems. We embed deeply with customers to solve high-leverage problems and act as the delivery engine for our most complex large-scale engagements. We move quickly from prototype to production and surface reusable patterns that shape our platform. We operate at the intersection of deployment and development – working closely with OpenAI Research, Product and Partnerships. About the Role As a Technical Deployment Lead (TDL), you will define how OpenAI delivers complex systems to customers. You will own how they are built, shipped, and adopted. You’ll translate business outcomes into a technical plan, run day-to-day execution across FDEs, Researchers, and Customer Engineers, and partner with customer teams to ensure delivery supports their goals. You will own delivery end-to-end: embedding with customers to map workflows and success criteria, ensuring components ship on time, and leading readiness and change management for adoption. You’ll track progress, manage dependencies, make sequencing decisions, and drive 0→1 prototypes through MVP and scale. You will also share field insights with Product and Research to guide roadmap and priorities. Success will be measured first and foremost by impact - deployments that deliver measurable value against customer goals, drive adoption, and become critical to their workflows. Additional measures of success include delivery reliability (milestones hit, low reopen/churn), operating leverage (patterns reused across deployments), judgment under pressure, and product impact (field signal that shifts roadmaps/architectures). This is a high-trust, high-autonomy role. Success requires deep technical project management expertise, extreme ownership of outcomes, and an ability to immerse in customer workflows and partner with customer teams to solve complex engineering problems at pace. This role is based in San Francisco. W
About the Team OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team turns research breakthroughs into production-grade systems. We embed deeply with customers to solve high-leverage problems and act as the delivery engine for our most complex large-scale engagements. We move quickly from prototype to production and surface reusable patterns that shape our platform. We operate at the intersection of deployment and development – working closely with OpenAI Research, Product and Partnerships. About the Role As a Technical Deployment Lead (TDL), you will define how OpenAI delivers complex systems to Semiconductor customers. You will own how solutions are scoped, built, shipped, and adopted across high-value engineering workflows such as RTL design, verification, and physical implementation. You’ll translate business outcomes into a technical plan, run day-to-day execution across FDEs, Researchers, and Customer Engineers, and partner with customer teams to ensure delivery supports their goals. You will focus on the semiconductor vertical to deploy next-generation AI capabilities. You will own delivery end-to-end: embedding with customers to map workflows and success criteria, ensuring components ship on time, and leading readiness and change management for adoption. You’ll track progress, manage dependencies, make sequencing decisions, and drive 0→1 prototypes through MVP and scale. You will also share field insights with Product and Research to guide roadmap and priorities. Success will be measured first and foremost by impact - deployments that deliver measurable value against customer goals, drive adoption, and become critical to their workflows. Additional measures of success include delivery reliability (milestones hit, low reopen/churn), operating leverage (patterns reused across deployments), judgment under pressure, and product impact (field signal that shifts roadmaps/architectures). This is a high-trust, high-autonomy role. Success requires deep technical project m
AI Systems Engineer - Codex Core Agents About The Team The Codex Core Agents team builds the agent harness that turns model capability into real-world action. We own the systems around the model: prompting and interpreting model outputs, executing actions safely in real environments, and feeding production experience back into better models and better agent behavior. This team sits close to research and works across the stack: harness, model interaction, inference, sandboxed execution, orchestration, evals, production reliability, and the performance envelope around tokens, latency, cost, capacity, and quality. The harness is open source and increasingly part of how models are trained and evaluated, making this one of the highest-leverage layers in Codex. About The Role We’re looking for engineers to build the AI systems that make Codex agents dependable in production. The ideal candidate is an agent-systems builder: hands-on across low-level systems and ML workflows, able to debug Codex behavior end to end across the harness, model behavior, inference/runtime stack, GPU fleet, and product surface. You’ll work with research, infrastructure, and product to design agent harness capabilities, run experiments and ablations across the model + system prompt + harness stack, build frameworks for assessing production agent performance, and turn messy failures into durable improvements. What You’ll Do Design and build the core agent harness and execution loop that lets Codex agents interpret model outputs, use tools, execute code, and complete long-horizon tasks safely. Build sandboxing, isolation, orchestration, state, and workflow infrastructure for agents operating in real development environments. Develop evaluation, experimentation, and debugging systems that distinguish harness issues, model behavior, inference/runtime issues, and product failures. Run ablations across prompts, model-facing interfaces, context construction, tool-use strategies, and harness behavior to
About the Team Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. Working across the entire model stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the constraints of physical systems to improve peoples’ lives. About the Role We are seeking an Actuator Gear Design Engineer to lead the development of custom gears and gear stages for advanced robotic systems. You will own actuator development from early architecture and concept generation through prototype validation and system integration, partnering closely with mechanical, electrical, controls, firmware, and reliability teams. You will partner with external suppliers and internal manufacturing to create full gearbox assemblies. This role focuses on the design, integration, and validation of precision gearing, including broader knowledge around motor electromagnetics, transmission types, sensing, structural components, and thermal architectures. You will help drive actuator development across the full engineering lifecycle while establishing scalable design, test, and integration practices for future robotic platforms. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person presence 4 days a week. In this role, you will: Lead the architecture, design, and integration of custom robotic actuator gearing. Define actuator requirements and system-level trade studies around torque density, bandwidth, efficiency, thermal performance, back drivability, inertia, reliability, manufacturability, and cost. Design precision electromechanical assemblies with strong attention to tolerances, alignment, load paths, thermal expansion, sealing, wear, and serviceability. Drive actuator integration into robotic systems, partnering closely with controls, firmware, electrical, and robotics software teams to optimize closed-lo
About the Team Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and advancing toward AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world environments. Working across the full model and systems stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the physical constraints of real-world systems to improve people’s lives. About the Role We're looking for an experienced Electrical Engineer to help develop the next generation of robotic systems at OpenAI. This role spans the full lifecycle of hardware development, from early concept exploration and prototyping through circuit design, component selection, PCB layout, bring-up, integration, and deployment. Engineers in this role are expected to independently drive significant hardware efforts from initial concept through deployment. You will translate ambiguous goals into concrete engineering plans, make key technical decisions, coordinate closely with cross-functional partners, and own execution through the iterations required to deliver a successful system. Many of the systems we build are still being defined. You will work closely with mechanical, firmware, software, controls, and research teams to evaluate new ideas, develop novel hardware, and integrate it into robotic platforms. Success in this role requires strong engineering judgment, comfort operating in ambiguous spaces, and the ability to balance rapid experimentation with the discipline required to build reliable and scalable systems. The ideal candidate enjoys building things from first principles and is equally comfortable evaluating a new technology, debugging a prototype on the bench, reviewing PCB layout details, and driving system integration efforts. You should be able to move quickly when appropriate, but also know when investing in robustness, simplicity, or infrastructure will create leverage for future development. This role is
Overview: The Data Acquisition team within the Foundations organization at OpenAI is responsible for all aspects of data collection to support our model training operations. Our team manages web crawling and GPTBot services and works closely with Data Processing, Architecture, and Scaling teams. We are looking for a skilled Software Engineer to join our Data Acquisition team. Responsibilities: Own and lead engineering projects in the area of data acquisition including web crawling, data ingestion, and search. Collaborate with other sub-teams, such as Data Processing, Architecture, and Scaling, to ensure smooth data flow and system operability. Work closely with the legal team to handle any compliance or data privacy-related matters. Develop and deploy highly scalable distributed systems capable of handling petabytes of data. Architect and implement algorithms for data indexing and search capabilities. Build and maintain backend services for data storage, including work with key-value databases and synchronization. Deploy solutions in a Kubernetes Infrastructure-as-Code environment and perform routine system checks. Conduct and analyze experiments on data to provide insights into system performance. Qualifications: BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or a related field. 4+ years of industry experience in software development. Experience with large web crawlers a plus Strong expertise in large stateful distributed systems and data processing. Proficiency in Kubernetes, and Infrastructure-as-Code concepts. Willingness and enthusiasm for trying new approaches and technologies. Ability to handle multiple tasks and adapt to changing priorities. Strong communication skills, both written and verbal. 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
About the Team Our Cyber team builds AI systems and products that help trusted defenders understand and respond to cyber threats while improving the safety and reliability of frontier models in security-sensitive settings. The team works across product engineering, model training, evaluations, safeguards, and deployment to make advanced cyber capabilities useful to defenders and responsibly managed. We collaborate closely with Safety/Preparedness, Research, Security, Legal, Communications, GTM, and external partners across OpenAI’s broader cyber work. About the Role We’re looking for research and software engineers to join Codex Cyber. You’ll help define and ship security products, work with trusted defenders and customers, shape model training and access patterns, and build research and evaluation systems for assessing cyber capabilities, validating safeguards, and improving training data. This role is hands-on and cross-functional, connecting product launches, model development, safety work, and real-world security use cases. In this role, you will: Help define and execute the technical roadmap for Codex Cyber’s security products, including evaluations, safeguards, trusted-defender workflows, and deployment decisions. Work with trusted defenders, customers, and partner teams to understand cyber use cases, evaluate risk, and turn feedback into product and research priorities. Shape cyber-specific model training and access patterns, including data, evaluations, validation, and deployment criteria. Build and validate systems for measuring cyber capabilities, monitoring misuse risk, and proving safeguards work in practice. Collaborate with Safety/Preparedness, Research, Security, Legal, Communications, Go-to-Market, and external partners on company-wide cyber priorities. Translate frontier cyber research into launch-ready tools, operational playbooks, and durable infrastructure for Codex and security products. You might thrive in this role if you: Enjoy 0 -> 1 envi
Join the engineering teams that bring OpenAI’s ideas safely to the world! The Applied Engineering team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to consumers and businesses. We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth. About the Role As OpenAI continues to grow, we are looking for experienced, problem-solving engineers to ensure our systems scale. Our success depends on our ability to quickly iterate on products while also ensuring that they are performant and reliable. You will 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. Successful candidates will play a crucial role in ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of our systems as we continue to expand. As a reliability expert, you will be at the forefront of maintaining and enhancing the stability, scalability, and performance of our rapidly evolving infrastructure. You will work closely with cross-functional teams, including software engineers, product managers, and data scientists, to build and maintain resilient systems that can handle our growing user base and workload. In this role, you will: Design and implement solutions to ensure the scalability of our infrastructure to meet rapidly increasing demands. Build and maintain the load, chaos and synthetic-testing software leveraged by development teams to make the systems they design and operate more reliable. Build and maintain automation tools to streamline repetitive tasks and improve system reliability. Build and maintain the platform for CPU, storage, GPU, and network lifecycle management to drive efficiency, accountability and dynamic optimization of our resources. Implement fault-tolerant and resilient design
About the Team OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with leading semiconductor companies to deploy production-grade AI systems across the entire chip design lifecycle: design, verification, and physical design. We operate at the intersection of customer delivery and core platform development, embedding deeply with customers to translate frontier model capabilities into systems that materially improve engineering workflows and accelerate innovation. Our work turns early, high-touch deployments into repeatable solution patterns, reference architectures, and evaluation practices that scale across the semiconductor ecosystem. About the Role We are seeking a highly skilled Physical Design Engineer to join our semiconductor-focused Forward Deployed Engineering team. This is a senior IC role that will begin with a strong emphasis on physical design expertise, technical judgment, advisory leverage, and customer credibility, with the expectation that the person will grow into a broader Forward Deployed Engineering role over time. In the near term, you will serve as the team’s physical design SME across semiconductor deployments: helping FDEs, Product, and Research understand backend implementation workflows, pressure-test AI-assisted solution ideas against real physical design constraints, and raise the quality of our customer-facing technical work. You will help the broader team build fluency in implementation flows, EDA tooling, signoff methodology, and the trade-offs that shape physical design decisions in practice. Over time, we expect this role to expand beyond SME support into broader FDE ownership: partnering directly with customers, shaping deployment strategy, building and iterating production-grade AI systems, driving technical workstreams, and helping turn high-touch semiconductor deployments into repeatable solutions. This is a strong fit for someone who brings deep physical design expertise today and is excited to grow into a customer-facing, syst
About the Team OpenAI's Research Team is at the forefront of AI research, pushing the limits of what AI can achieve. Our team is dedicated to developing advanced AI systems that are powerful, safe, and beneficial for everyone. About the Role The Research IP Partnerships team is in need of Technical Program Managers (TPMs) to streamline the integration of our applied research with external strategic partners. This role is critical for synthesizing research from cross functional teams, enabling model deployment, and ensuring new technologies are effectively adopted. You will act as the connection that enables our partners to deploy the most advanced AI models. Your primary focus will be to increase our research velocity and ensure that our deployments are successful and collaborative with our partners. 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. In this role, you will: Build and share a deep understanding of frontier AI model development Partner with internal and external teams to drive deployment of the latest OpenAI technologies Manage critical inquiries from both technical and non-technical partners Design and implement simple, scalable processes that solve complex problems Deliver high-profile pipeline and tooling projects on tight deadlines Work across research and engineering to align goals, streamline communication, and support business priorities You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience in a strategic partnerships and technical program management role Can right-size process to align stakeholders while ensuring speed of delivery (action-oriented) Are fantastic at building cross-functional relationships and having empathy for the many roles involved in deploying research Can design and build tools (via code / no-code / AI) to facilitate internal processes Are a great communicator across written, presentation, and visual forms. Are engaged and c
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