> 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.

# Software Engineer, Safety Engineering

Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/830735363503685c

OpenAI posts a FDE role to build for teams inside the company in San Francisco, CA, at $207,000–$385,000 base, above the senior FDE median of $190,000 across 1,864 postings with pay. Own end-to-end development of internal tools for model safety, focusing on mental health and vulnerable-user protections Read from the employer’s posting on November 8, 2026.

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

Posted Aug 31, 2026 by OpenAI · open on Ashby as of Nov 8, 2026

**$207,000–$385,000** + equity San Francisco, CA Hybrid Full-time

Own end-to-end development of internal tools for model safety, focusing on mental health and vulnerable-user protections

- [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2F830735363503685c&placement=top)
- [View posting at OpenAI](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/9371f837-70ef-4387-a4b7-70f252b04aa5/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

$207K–$385K Above the median

Midpoint $296K · median $190K

This job $207K to $385K. Senior FDE postings, 1,864 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 (not covered)
3. Implementation
4. Operations

- **Coding**: Writes production code

- **Builds for**: Both

- **Level**: Senior

- **Role**: Individual contributor

### What they ask for

Experience

- **5+ years** relevant engineering experience at tech and product-driven companies

Background

- **Software engineering**

### Do you meet what the posting states?

The posting asks for 5+ 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 Aug 31, 2026

### About the Team

The Safety Systems org is responsible for various safety work to ensure our best models can be safely deployed to the real world to benefit the society and is at the forefront of OpenAI's mission to build and deploy safe AGI, driving our commitment to AI safety and fostering a culture of trust and transparency.

The Safety Engineering team builds the platforms and tools that make OpenAI’s models safe to use in the real world. We partner closely with researchers, product teams, and policy to turn safety ideas into reliable, scalable systems: measuring risk, enforcing safeguards, and continuously improving how models behave in production. Our work sits at the intersection of product engineering, data, and AI, and directly shapes how millions of people experience OpenAI’s technology.

### About the Role

We’re looking for a self-starter engineer who loves building products in an iterative, fast-moving environment—especially internal tools that unlock real-world impact. In this role, you’ll build full-stack tooling for our Safety Systems teams that directly improves the safety and reliability of OpenAI’s models, including in sensitive areas like mental health and other vulnerable-user protections. Your work will increase the team’s velocity in identifying and fixing safety issues and help tighten the feedback loop between policy, data, and the model training cycle.

### In this role, you will

- Own the end-to-end development of internal tools that help improve the safety of OpenAI’s models (with a focus on areas like mental health and other vulnerable-user protections)
- Partner closely with Safety Systems researchers, engineers, and model policy creators to understand workflows, pain points, and requirements—and translate them into durable product solutions
- Build full-stack experiences to support core model policy workflows, such as labeling and inspecting data, analyzing and reviewing failure cases, and surfacing insights for iteration
- Optimize internal applications for usability, speed, and scale to increase team velocity and reduce time-to-fix for safety issues
- Transform successful AI assisted safety workflows into external facing safety products, that empowers developers to build safer AI, uplift the industry standard for AI safety, and prepare the world for more capable AGI.

### You might thrive in this role if you

- Have 5+ years of relevant engineering experience at tech and product-driven companies
- Are proficient with JavaScript, React, and other web technologies
- Are proficient with at least one backend language (we use Python)
- Have experience with relational databases like Postgres/MySQL
- Have an interest in AI/ML (direct experience not required)
- Are excited to partner closely with researchers and policy writers to ship tools that directly improve the safety of OpenAI’s models

### 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/9371f837-70ef-4387-a4b7-70f252b04aa5/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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