iOS Engineer, Social Products

About the Team (Incubation)

The Incubation team builds new product lines from zero to one — exploring bold ideas and turning the most promising ones into real, shipped experiences. We work at the intersection of design, engineering, and research to prototype quickly, learn from real users, and scale what works. Our goal is to unlock entirely new ways people can create, communicate, and get things done with OpenAI’s technology — with a high bar for quality, safety, and craft.

About the Role

We’re looking for an engineer to lead the development of new iOS experiences inside our Incubation team. You’ll help invent and ship early-stage products that bring AI into people’s lives in ways that feel intuitive, human, and genuinely useful. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role: you’ll move fast from prototype to product, help shape product direction through iteration, and lay strong technical foundations as ideas mature into scalable systems.

We’re looking for engineers who thrive in small, nimble teams, bring strong product instincts, and pair sharp judgment with excellent execution. You should be comfortable operating with ambiguity, running experiments, learning quickly from results, and translating those learnings into both product and architecture decisions.

In this role, you will:

• Build and ship new iOS experiences that demonstrate what’s possible when AI is deeply integrated into the product — from early prototypes to public launches.

• Drive end-to-end development of core features and workflows, using Swift and modern iOS frameworks (SwiftUI/UIKit), with a strong emphasis on craft and UX polish.

• Partner closely with product, design, research, and backend to translate early concepts into delightful, high-leverage user experiences.

• Own performance, reliability, and quality — ensuring the app feels fast, stable, and responsive across devices and geographies.

• Establish strong technical foundations (architecture, testing, observability) that let us iterate quickly now and scale confidently later.

• Contribute technical leadership by raising the bar on iOS engineering practices and helping shape the direction of OpenAI’s mobile platform.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a focus on building and scaling iOS applications.

• Have shipped high-quality, user-facing mobile products that balance delightful design with reliability, performance, and resilience.

• Have owned complex mobile systems end-to-end — from architecture and implementation to monitoring, iteration, and improvement.

• Are fluent in Swift and deeply familiar with the Apple ecosystem (Xcode, UIKit, SwiftUI, modern concurrency).

• Make thoughtful architectural tradeoffs that optimize for speed of iteration now and maintainability later.

• Care deeply about creating experiences that feel simple, human, and trustworthy — especially when AI is involved.

• Enjoy building in an environment where product direction is discovered through shipping and learning, not fully specified upfront.

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.