Software Engineer Internship / Co-op, Applied Emerging Talent (Fall 2026)

Department: Applied AI

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $60 per hour

Employment Type: FullTime

About the Team

The Applied team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to the world. We seek to learn from deployment and broadly distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. We aim to make our innovative tools globally accessible, transcending geographic, economic, or platform barriers. Our commitment is to facilitate the use of AI to enhance lives, fostered by rigorous insights into how people use our products.

About the Role

We are seeking Software Engineering Interns (Emerging Talent) to join our Applied Engineering teams. You’ll work in a highly iterative, collaborative, fast-paced environment to bring our technology to millions of users around the world, and ensure it’s delivered with safety and reliability in mind. We value engineers who are self-starters, care deeply about the end user experience, and take pride in building products to solve customer needs.

This is a 15-week, paid, in-person internship based in our San Francisco, CA office during Fall 2026.

In this role, you will:

• Build new customer-facing ChatGPT and OpenAI API features and product experiences end-to-end

• Collaborate with a cross-functional team of engineers, researchers, product managers, designers, and operations folks to create cutting-edge products

• Optimize applications for speed and scale

• Create a diverse and inclusive culture that makes all feel welcome.

Your background looks something like:

• Currently pursuing a Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or relevant technical field

• Must have at least one semester of schooling left after the completion of your internship

• Proficiency with JavaScript, React, and some backend languages (we use Python)

• Some experience with relational databases like Postgres/MySQL

• Interest in AI/ML (direct experience not required)

• Ability to move fast in an environment where things are sometimes loosely defined and may have competing priorities or deadlines

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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