Software Engineer, API Multimodal

About the role

This role involves building and operating the systems that power OpenAI's image, audio, and real-time APIs. You will integrate new research into stable developer experiences, focusing on backend and system architecture. This position requires hands-on work, owning projects from start to finish, and collaborating with research, inference, and safety teams.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Create and deploy developer-facing APIs and backend services for frontier models.
• Design low-latency systems for streaming, requests, sessions, and model integration to ensure reliable multimodal interactions at scale.
• Collaborate with research teams to bring new model capabilities into production and incorporate user feedback.
• Manage the availability, latency, scalability, and cost efficiency of your services.
• Lead projects from technical design and implementation through launch and ongoing improvements, while enhancing team engineering standards.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional experience, excluding internships, in backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering.
• Proven experience designing, building, and operating production backend services, developer-facing APIs, or distributed systems.
• Strong software engineering and systems knowledge, with a history of leading complex technical projects from concept to production.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, Rust, or TypeScript.
• Experience building reliable, scalable systems and understanding distributed architecture, concurrency, latency, observability, and operational trade-offs.
• Product judgment and developer empathy, including the ability to translate complex model or infrastructure capabilities into clear, intuitive APIs.
• Clear communication and a collaborative approach when working with researchers, product managers, designers, infrastructure engineers, and customers.
• A strong sense of ownership, comfort with uncertainty, and a focus on learning from users while continuously improving engineering quality.

Nice to have

• Experience with real-time streaming, audio processing, speech systems, image generation, computer vision, or multimodal AI applications.

Skills & tools

• Python
• Go
• Rust
• TypeScript

Practical notes

• Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act for US-based candidates.
• OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.