Software Engineer, API Multimodal

The role

You will build and operate the products and distributed systems behind OpenAI's image, audio, and real-time APIs. This role involves designing developer-facing APIs and backend services to bring frontier model capabilities to production.

What you will do

• Design, build, and ship developer-facing APIs and backend services that serve frontier models.
• Architect low-latency streaming, request, session, and model integration systems.
• Work with Research to bring new model capabilities into production.
• Own the availability, latency, scalability, and cost efficiency of services.
• Own projects from technical design and implementation through launch and ongoing iteration.
• Raise the team's engineering standards.

Required qualifications

• 7+ years of professional experience, excluding internships, in backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering roles.
• Track record of designing, building, and operating production backend services, developer-facing APIs, or distributed systems.
• Strong software engineering and systems fundamentals.
• Experience leading technically complex projects from ambiguous ideas to production.
• Proficiency in one or more general-purpose backend languages, such as Python, Go, Rust, or TypeScript.
• Experience building reliable, scalable systems and reasoning about distributed architecture, concurrency, latency, observability, and operational tradeoffs.
• Product judgment and developer empathy.
• Clear communication and a collaborative approach.
• Strong sense of ownership, comfort with ambiguity, and a bias toward learning directly from users.

Nice to have

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

About the company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. They seek to safely deploy AI to the world through their products.