Software Engineer, Agent Productivity

About the Team OpenAI’s Application Engineering team builds the internal products and platforms that help OpenAI operate securely and at scale. We engineer, own, and evolve OpenAI’s core productivity ecosystem, creating secure applications, integrations, automation, and reusable tooling where off-the-shelf software is not enough. Our work spans employee-facing experiences and the services, APIs, control planes, and governance that make them reliable, permission-aware, and scalable. We also act as a customer zero for OpenAI’s technology, building the enterprise foundations that let employees and agents safely access the context, tools, and actions they need. We partner closely with IT, Security, product teams, and platform providers to turn company-wide problems into durable systems, learn from real internal workflows, and help shape the products we deploy. We create paved paths that let teams move quickly without compromising security or operational quality. About the Role As a Staff Software Engineer on Agent Productivity, you will shape the foundation that enables teams to build agents with secure access to the context and capabilities they need. Slack will be the first and deepest implementation surface—and where you spend most of your time—owning its application architecture, integrations, APIs, governance, and administration automation while building patterns that extend to internal systems, identity platforms, and other enterprise applications. This is a hands-on engineering role with broad organizational impact as agents support more employee workflows. You will define platform architecture, build reusable foundations, and establish secure patterns for identity, permissions, connectivity, and operations that make agents easier to develop, deploy, and manage. In this role, you will: - Own the technical strategy and architecture that enable teams to build, connect, and deploy agents quickly and safely, using Slack as the primary implementation surface. - Design and build secure, reliable services that give agents permission-aware access to context, tools, and actions across Slack, internal systems, identity platforms, and enterprise applications. - Establish scalable patterns for connectivity, context retrieval, authorization, and action execution across systems with different capabilities and constraints. - Develop reusable SDKs, connectors, templates, testing tools, and deployment patterns that reduce integration effort and improve developer productivity. - Build policy-aware automation and lifecycle management for agents, applications, and integrations, including ownership, permissions, approvals, credential rotation, and decommissioning. - Implement governance and observability that enforce least privilege, protect user and workspace boundaries, and provide visibility into agent behavior, data access, and information sharing. - Set operational standards for reliability, auditability, testing, incident response, and secure self-service. - Partner accross IT, Security, Privacy, Legal, product teams, and platform providers to shape technical direction, influence roadmaps, and translate agent use cases into scalable systems. You might thrive in this role if you: - Deep hands-on software engineering experience and a track record of building and operating production systems at scale. - Strong backend and distributed-systems fundamentals, including API design, integrations, and production reliability. - Experience building developer platforms, reusable tooling, or shared services that make applications and agents easier to develop and deploy. - Experience integrating enterprise platforms such as Slack and working through real-world API, identity, and operational constraints. - Experience designing secure, permission-aware systems that access sensitive data or take actions on behalf of users. - The ability to lead ambiguous technical initiatives across teams while balancing developer experience, security, and long-term archi…