About the job
As a software engineer on API Multimodal, you will build and operate the products and distributed systems behind OpenAI’s image, audio, and real-time APIs. You will work across model integration, API design, and production infrastructure to turn new research capabilities into reliable developer experiences. This hands-on role combines backend and systems depth with product judgment: you will own projects end to end, partner with Research, Inference, and Safety, and help make multimodal AI useful at scale. Model training experience is not required.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and ship developer-facing APIs and backend services that serve frontier models.
- Architect low-latency streaming, request, session, and model integration systems that make complex multimodal interactions reliable and intuitive at scale.
- Work directly with Research to bring new model capabilities into production, shape the systems around them, and incorporate feedback from real-world developers and customers.
- Own the availability, latency, scalability, and cost efficiency of the services you build.
- Own projects from technical design and implementation through launch and ongoing iteration, while raising the team’s engineering standards.
Qualifications
Minimum
- 7+ years of professional experience, excluding internships, in backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering roles.
- A track record of designing, building, and operating production backend services, developer-facing APIs, or distributed systems.
- Strong software engineering and systems fundamentals, with 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, including an ability to turn complex model or infrastructure capabilities into clear, intuitive APIs.
- Clear communication and a collaborative approach to working with researchers, product managers, designers, infrastructure engineers, and customers.
- A strong sense of ownership, comfort with ambiguity, and a bias toward learning directly from users while continuously improving engineering quality.
Preferred
- Experience with real-time streaming, audio processing, speech systems, image generation, computer vision, or multimodal AI applications is helpful, but not required.