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.

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.

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.

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