Founding Full Stack Software Engineer, Legal

ABOUT THE TEAM The Legal team is building the next generation of AI-powered products and experiences for the legal industry. We are exploring how advanced AI systems can transform legal workflows, improve access to information, and enable legal professionals and organizations to work more effectively. As a founding member of the Legal engineering team, you will help define the technical foundation for this new product area from the earliest stages. You’ll operate at the intersection of AI, product, and real-world legal workflows—identifying opportunities, building prototypes, and turning emerging ideas into scalable products that can create meaningful impact. We operate with a startup-like mindset inside OpenAI: small teams, rapid iteration cycles, and a willingness to explore bold ideas, learn quickly, and adapt based on user feedback. Our goal is to build products that meaningfully improve how legal professionals work while leveraging OpenAI’s cutting-edge models and infrastructure. ABOUT THE ROLE As a Founding Full-Stack Software Engineer on the Legal team, you will help imagine, build, and scale new AI-powered products for the legal industry. You’ll work across the stack to design intuitive user experiences, build robust backend systems, and create the foundations for products used by legal professionals and organizations around the world. You’ll have significant ownership from the earliest stages—working closely with product, design, research, and go-to-market partners to understand customer needs, shape product direction, and deliver high-impact solutions. This includes rapidly prototyping new concepts, building production-quality applications on top of OpenAI’s platforms, and developing new technical approaches when existing systems are not sufficient. We’re looking for engineers who thrive in ambiguity, have strong product instincts, and enjoy building from 0→1. You should be comfortable moving quickly, making thoughtful technical decisions, and taking ownership across the entire product lifecycle—from initial exploration through launch and scale. IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL: - Build and ship full-stack products that leverage OpenAI models to solve complex problems in legal workflows. - Own projects end-to-end, from early prototypes and technical exploration through production deployment and iteration. - Design and develop intuitive user experiences across frontend and backend systems. - Build scalable, reliable systems on top of OpenAI’s internal platforms and APIs while contributing new technical foundations where needed. - Partner closely with product managers, designers, researchers, applied AI teams, and customers to identify opportunities and translate insights into impactful products. - Rapidly prototype and experiment with new AI capabilities, using real-world feedback to guide product decisions. - Develop a deep understanding of legal workflows, customer needs, and industry challenges to inform technical strategy. - Help establish engineering culture, technical standards, and product practices as an early member of the team. - Learn from and contribute alongside deeply experienced engineers while fostering a high-trust, inclusive, and candid team environment. YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU: - Have 6+ years of professional software engineering experience. - Have built and shipped full-stack applications end-to-end, from early prototypes through production systems. - Are excited by ambiguous, open-ended problems and can turn broad ideas into shipped products. - Have strong frontend and backend engineering skills and enjoy working across the stack. - Are comfortable moving quickly, iterating based on feedback, and making pragmatic technical decisions. - Have strong product instincts and enjoy collaborating directly with users and cross-functional partners. - Are energized by emerging AI capabilities and the opportunity to rethink how software is built. - Learn quickly, pick up new technologies as needed, and choose the right tools to solve problems effectively. - Thrive in small, high-ownership teams where engineers have significant influence over product direction and technical strategy. - Welcome direct, constructive feedback and offer the same to others with clarity and respect. 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 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 possess