Software Engineer, Astral

About the Team

The Astral team builds high-performance developer tools to power the future of programming, at OpenAI and beyond, including Ruff, uv, and ty. The Astral toolchain sees hundreds of millions of installs per month and powers hundreds of millions of package downloads per day for the Python ecosystem. As a team, we are building on those foundations to continue solving impactful tooling problems as programming evolves.

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced software engineer to build next-generation programming language tooling. If you like writing high-performance Rust, it could be a good fit; if you like thinking about the future of programming, it could also be a good fit. Strong candidates tend to have deep experience with Rust, Python, open source, compilers, or developer tools — but few candidates are deep in all of these areas, and we've hired candidates without prior Rust or Python experience.

In this role, you will:

• Design and implement features in Astral’s existing open source projects (Ruff, uv, ty, and python-build-standalone, and more).
• Support Astral’s open source projects as a maintainer, triaging user issues, reviewing pull requests, and participating in community discussions.
• Evolve the Astral toolchain to accelerate development velocity at OpenAI.
• Build entirely new tools, in entirely different programming ecosystems, to power the future of agentic software development.

Your background might look something like:

• 5+ years of professional engineering experience, excluding internships, in relevant engineering roles.
• High agency and comfort operating in a fast-moving environment, with strong ownership of security, reliability, and operational excellence.
• Strong developer empathy and communication skills, including experience maintaining open source projects.
• Exceptional systems engineering fundamentals and a track record of leading complex projects from ambiguous problem statements through to user impact.
• Proficiency in one or more system programming languages (like Rust).

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.

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.

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.