> AI agents: this is one page of Nextmove’s FDE site, in Markdown. Nextmove is a job board and free career service for forward deployed engineers (FDEs). Each posting is classified from its text, not its title: the kind of work, how much of it is production code, pre-sales weight, time at customer sites, travel, remote arrangement, level and posted base pay. The site also publishes the aggregates: median pay by level, metro, company and kind of work, and which companies started hiring FDEs each week. Every page under https://nextmove.md/fde is served this way; the index of pages is https://nextmove.md/llms.txt.

# Backend Software Engineer, GTM Innovation

Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/0f9099e5e00530f9

OpenAI posts a FDE role to build for teams inside the company in San Francisco, CA, at $347,000–$445,000 base, above the senior FDE median of $190,000 across 1,849 postings with pay. Backend engineer on GTM Innovation building persistent AI coworkers that automate digital knowledge work for go-to-market teams. Read from the employer’s posting on November 6, 2026.

- [OpenAI](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/openai)

Posted Feb 3, 2026 by OpenAI · open on Ashby as of Nov 6, 2026

**$347,000–$445,000** + equity San Francisco, CA Hybrid Full-time

Backend engineer on GTM Innovation building persistent AI coworkers that automate digital knowledge work for go-to-market teams.

- [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2F0f9099e5e00530f9&placement=top)
- [View posting at OpenAI](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/43174eb6-0ffe-4744-9323-c7969e7ea2e1/application)

Free. Upload your resume once, see why each FDE role fits, and get introduced only when you say so.

## At a glance

### Posted base pay

$347K–$445K Above the median

Midpoint $396K · median $190K

This job $347K to $445K. Senior FDE postings, 1,849 postings: the middle 50% of posted pay is $160K to $220K, median $190K.

[Compare pay across all OpenAI postings](https://nextmove.md/fde/salary/openai)

### The work

Builds for teams inside the company

Balance **Mostly building**

Project stages

1. Pre-sales (not covered)
2. Proof of concept
3. Implementation
4. Operations

- **Coding**: Writes production code

- **Builds for**: Internal teams

- **Level**: Senior

- **Role**: Individual contributor

### What they ask for

Experience

- **6+ years** software engineering on applied AI or user-facing systems

Background

- **Software engineering**

### Do you meet what the posting states?

The posting asks for 6+ years. How many do you have?

The posting reads as a senior role. What level are you at now?

The job is in San Francisco, CA. Could you work there?

Which of these have you used in production?

Answer each one. Nothing is saved or sent.

[What postings ask for, by background →](https://nextmove.md/fde/paths)

## Conditions

- **Location**: San Francisco, CA

- **Work arrangement**: Hybrid

- **Employment type**: Full-time

- **Pay**:

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## The job description from OpenAI

Posted by OpenAI on Feb 3, 2026

### About the Team

GTM Innovation’s mission is to automate 100% of digital knowledge work for OpenAI's GTM so sellers spend more time directly with customers applying their strategy and judgment. AGI-level reasoning doesn’t mean organization-level transformation “just works” out of the box; orgs must be redesigned around abundant intelligence and persistent virtual coworkers. The team builds and scales a fleet of virtual coworkers that operate as full-time employees and move increasingly ambitious tasks from the foreground to the background.

### About the Role

We’re looking for a product-minded backend engineer to build the systems behind a new generation of AI coworkers: persistent agents that understand their environment, take on meaningful work, and improve over time.

You’ll design and ship the foundational infrastructure that makes these agents effective in production, from durable workflow orchestration to long-running agent loops built on the Codex harness to the context, memory, tools, and permissions model they need to act reliably. You’ll also build rigorous evaluation, observability, and feedback systems that make agent quality measurable and continuously improve how these systems perform.

This is a hands-on, high-ownership role at the intersection of agent infrastructure, applied AI, and product engineering. You’ll work directly with go-to-market teams and collaborate across OpenAI’s product and research organizations to turn ambiguous, real-world needs into dependable systems that help OpenAI meet the world at scale.

### In this role, you will

- Build and scale durable agent runtimes, long-running agent loops, and workflow orchestration using the Codex harness and emerging agent infrastructure.
- Design context and memory systems that ground agents in the information they need while preserving clear access boundaries.
- Develop rigorous evaluation frameworks, production feedback loops, and observability to measure agent quality and improve it over time.
- Partner directly with Sales, Technical Success, and Revenue Operations to identify high-value problems and own solutions from prototype through production.
- Build reliable backend services, data pipelines, and integrations that enable agents to take meaningful action across real-world workflows.
- Collaborate with OpenAI’s Product and Research teams to advance agent capabilities and turn production learnings into platform improvements.

### You’ll thrive in this role if you

- Have 6+ years of experience as a software engineer working on applied AI or user-facing systems
- Former founder, or early engineer at a startup who built a product from scratch is a plus
- Domain experience or demonstrated interest in sales technology or enterprise knowledge work automation
- Continually reinvent your software development process as coding models and developer tools improve
- Take initiative, move quickly, and operate with a strong sense of ownership
- Enjoy working closely with end users and shaping 0→1 products
- Are collaborative, curious, and motivated to make an outsized impact at the frontier of AI

### 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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

[View posting at OpenAI](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/43174eb6-0ffe-4744-9323-c7969e7ea2e1/application)

## About OpenAI

Builds frontier AI models and ships them through ChatGPT consumer and enterprise products, Codex, and developer APIs.

Late-stage private · 5000+ people

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- [Compare senior FDE salary ranges](https://nextmove.md/fde/salary/senior)
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