Principal Software Engineer, Productivity

Description

The Connector Ecosystem team builds the platform and product experiences that let people extend ChatGPT and Codex, covering plugins, skills, connectors, interactive apps, and open standards such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

The team makes plugins simple to find, install, and use, makes sure they get invoked at the right moment, and looks for new ways people can get value from them.

The aim is for anyone to turn a useful workflow into a plugin and share it with others. A plugin can bundle instructions and skills with links to the tools and data it depends on. The team's work covers creating and publishing plugins, running them reliably across products, handling permissions and approvals clearly, and giving admins the controls they need to roll plugins out in their organizations. The team works closely with Research to improve tool quality as models change.

This is a product-minded Principal Software Engineer role. You will set technical direction, build the systems behind plugins, and improve how models use them. Depending on your focus, you might scale general infrastructure and identity-related integrations across products, raise plugin quality where backend engineering meets applied AI, or work on the product experience to grow plugin usage. You will lead complex initiatives across teams and take problems from diagnosis and design through to implementation and release.

You will stay hands-on while making product and design decisions with Product, Design, Research, and engineering partners. You will help decide what gets built and how it works, turn user and developer needs into clear priorities, and make technical calls that balance fast iteration with long-term reliability and maintainability.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction and lead complex initiatives across the Plugin Ecosystem, keeping architecture and execution aligned across teams.
• Make product and design decisions with cross-functional partners, help set priorities, and shape clear experiences for users and developers.
• Design and ship the APIs, SDKs, and services developers use to extend ChatGPT and Codex.
• Build experiences that help users find, install, and use plugins so they get more done.
• Make plugins easier to create, test, publish, update, and share.
• Improve when and how models use plugins, from picking the right plugin to finishing a task. Work with Research to find causes of failure and measure gains as models evolve.
• Improve plugin reliability and interaction quality across ChatGPT and Codex, including interactive apps, with clear error messages and ways to recover.
• Build consistent permissions, approvals, and admin controls so individuals and organizations can adopt plugins with confidence.
• Work with developers and partners to turn recurring problems into changes in the platform, tooling, and documentation.
• Work with engineering, Product, Research, Security, and Trust & Safety to scale plugin infrastructure and ship safe, reliable execution.
• Raise the engineering bar through mentoring, careful code reviews, and clear technical guidance.

Requirements

• You have 10+ years of software engineering experience and a record of shipping products or platforms that people and developers depend on.
• You have led complex technical initiatives across teams and driven product and design decisions alongside product managers and designers.
• You care about product quality and can make complex capabilities feel simple, from finding a useful plugin to finishing a task with it.
• You have firm views on APIs and abstractions and can explain the tradeoffs behind them. Experience with identity, permissions, or integration-heavy systems is especially valuable.
• You like talking with users and developers, understanding their goals, and turning recurring problems into product and platform improvements.
• You can move between product questions and technical detail, work across teams, and take an unclear problem all the way to production.
• You are comfortable across web interfaces and backend systems. Experience building applied AI systems, diagnosing model-tool interactions, and measuring reliability and quality is especially valuable.
• You have built products people rely on or software other developers use, such as an API or SDK, an open-source project, a developer platform, or internal tools with real users.

Conditions

This role is based in San Francisco.

The role follows a hybrid model with 3 days in the office per week.

Relocation assistance is offered to new employees.

Background checks follow applicable law. Applicants with arrest or conviction records are considered in line with 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, the employer believes criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with these duties, which may lead to a conditional offer being withdrawn: protecting company hardware from theft, loss, or damage; returning all hardware and its data when employment ends; and keeping proprietary, confidential, and non-public information confidential. The duties also require access to secure and protected IT systems and related data security obligations.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other legally protected characteristic.