Applied AI Engineer, Codex | Tokyo
OpenAIRole Description & Requirements
About the Team
OpenAI’s Applied AI Engineering team helps organizations turn frontier AI capabilities into safe, reliable, and high-impact production systems. For software engineering organizations, this means helping customers adopt Codex and other OpenAI capabilities across the software development lifecycle—transforming how teams plan, build, test, review, and deliver software.
We work directly with engineering leaders and hands-on developers to identify high-value opportunities, design and implement AI-powered development workflows, and scale what works across engineering organizations. We turn lessons from these deployments into better products, reusable architectures, and technical patterns that help developers everywhere get more value from Codex.
About the Role
As an Applied AI Engineer focused on Codex, you will partner directly with leading engineering organizations to design, build, and deploy AI systems that transform how software is developed. You will combine deep technical judgment, hands-on engineering, and customer leadership to take ambitious ideas from workflow and use-case selection through prototyping, evaluation, production rollout, and scaled adoption.
You will work alongside engineering teams to build advanced AI coding workflows, integrations, automations, and evaluation systems—often using Codex itself as part of your development process. You will help customers make technical decisions involving model behavior, agentic workflows, developer environments, security, reliability, evaluation, and operational readiness, while ensuring deployments translate into measurable improvements in engineering productivity and software delivery.
You will work closely with OpenAI Product, Research, Engineering, Security, Sales, and the broader Codex organization, translating real-world deployment experience into high-signal product and model feedback. Success is measured by production systems, sustained developer adoption, and meaningful improvements to how engineering organizations build software—not simply successful demonstrations or enablement activity.
This role is based in Tokyo, Japan. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role, you will:
Partner directly with engineering leaders and hands-on developers to identify high-value opportunities for Codex and translate them into technical architectures, implementation plans, evaluation strategies, and measurable success criteria.
Design, build, and deploy AI-powered software development workflows that improve how engineering teams plan, write, test, review, debug, and deliver software.
Work hands-on in code to build prototypes, evaluation harnesses, reference implementations, integrations, workflow automations, and production accelerators—often using Codex as part of your own development process.
Help customers progress from promising experiments to reliable production workflows, sustained developer adoption, and scaled impact across engineering organizations.
Design systematic approaches for evaluating AI coding systems using representative software engineering tasks, automated graders, production signals, and developer feedback.
Make sound technical decisions across models, agents, tools, developer environments, integrations, reliability, observability, latency, cost, safety, security, and operational readiness.
Diagnose complex implementation challenges, reproduce failures, test hypotheses, and drive technical blockers toward resolution.
Lead technical deep dives, workshops, and hands-on enablement that help engineering teams understand and adopt advanced AI coding workflows effectively and safely.
Gather high-fidelity insights from real-world Codex deployments and translate them into clear product proposals, model feedback, and technical requirements for OpenAI Product, Research, and Engineering teams.
Create reusable architectures, tooling, examples, guides, and technical patterns—including contributions to resources such as the OpenAI Cookbook—that accelerate future Codex deployments.
Influence customer engineering strategy by helping technical leaders understand how AI coding systems can reshape their software development lifecycle, engineering practices, and organizational workflows.
You’ll thrive in this role if you:
Have a demonstrated track record of designing, building, and delivering software or AI systems in enterprise environments, including taking systems from prototype to production. Relevant backgrounds may include applied AI or ML engineering, forward-deployed engineering, software engineering, developer tooling, customer engineering, solutions architecture, or technical consulting.
Can point to substantial personal contributions in code, architecture, evaluation, debugging, integrations, or production engineering—not only program, enablement, or stakeholder management.
Are highly proficient in Python and comfortable working across modern software development environments; experience with JavaScript, TypeScript, or another relevant language is valuable.
Are an active user of AI coding tools and have developed a strong point of view on how AI can improve developer productivity and software engineering workflows.
Enjoy building high-signal prototypes, integrations, automations, and production solutions that demonstrate and deliver what AI coding systems can enable.
Understand how to evaluate AI coding systems systematically, including designing representative tasks, automated evaluations, production signals, and mechanisms for incorporating developer feedback.
Have navigated enterprise production requirements such as developer tooling integrations, reliability, observability, security, privacy, data governance, performance, and cost.
Can connect technical decisions to developer workflows, adoption, engineering productivity, and measurable business outcomes.
Communicate with clarity and credibility across hands-on engineers, engineering leaders, security teams, product leaders, and executives.
Are comfortable leading technical workshops and hands-on sessions that help engineering organizations adopt new development workflows and technologies.
Bring high agency, strong technical judgment, and end-to-end ownership in ambiguous and rapidly evolving environments.
Learn quickly, challenge assumptions constructively, and collaborate with humility; deep prior experience with OpenAI products is not required.
Are able to speak Japanese and English fluently.
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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