Principal Software Engineer, Simulation

Job description

About the Team OpenAI's research training infrastructure powers how our frontier models are trained and evaluated. The Simulation team sits at the intersection between the agentic harness that powers OpenAI's products and the research infrastructure where GPT-next is trained, ensuring that our model's training environment is as realistic as possible. This team owns the integration layer that connects our production harness capabilities into the training stack. The work is highly cross-functional and high leverage: researchers depend on it to run experiments and evaluations reliably as well as to develop the next generation of harness capabilities. Failures in this surface can materially affect training velocity and correctness. About the Role We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to lead the architecture and evolution of the Simulation Platform. You'll own a critical interface between research and engineering, building the systems, APIs, and operational patterns that let researchers use agentic coding infrastructure safely and effectively in training environments. This role is ideal for a senior backend or infrastructure engineer with strong technical judgment, product sense for highly technical users, and the ability to drive execution across multiple teams. The highest-leverage work is building robust infrastructure that supports and accelerates research without compromising engineering quality. In this role, you will Design, build, and evolve the integration between the Codex harness that powers OpenAI's products and research training infrastructure used for training GPT-next Build a platform for our LLMs to train and be evaluated in simulated environments that mimic their deployment setting as closely as possible, on every axis: agentic harness, compute substrate, timing, tools, data sources, humans in the loop, and more Own major integration surfaces end-to-end, from architecture and API design through rollout, operations, and long-term maintenance Build reliable execution systems that can support demanding training workloads at scale Partner closely with research, agent, infrastructure, and platform teams to support new training use cases and harness capabilities Design clean, stable interfaces and workflows for highly technical internal users who move quickly and expect strong ergonomics Prevent one-off workarounds from becoming long-term t…