Engineering Manager, Multimodal (API)

OpenAI; California (MO); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead a multimodal API product suite in San Francisco. You will own the roadmap for real-time processing, transcription, speech generation, and image APIs, while building and mentoring a high-performing team to deliver scalable APIs that reach millions of end users.

You will collaborate with product, design, and research teams to refine architectures and models, ensuring robust performance and excellent user experience in a fast-paced startup

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading engineering teams delivering complex, high-quality products at scale.
• Strong software engineering background and system design skills.
• Excellent collaboration and communication across diverse teams and stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Build, mentor, and grow a high-performing engineering team focused on multimodal API products.
• Collaborate with product managers, designers, and stakeholders to define the strategic vision and roadmap.
• Work with research teams to improve core multimodal models for API use cases.
• Guide technical and architectural decisions with emphasis on scalability and user experience.
• Foster a culture of innovation, continuous improvement, and accountability within the team.

Skills

Engineering leadership

System architecture

Collaboration & communication

Multimodal AI familiarity

Startup environment

Tools

Cloud platforms

Distributed architectures

Job description

About the Team:

OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. Our API is the industry's most widely adopted AI platform, empowering startups, indie developers, and Fortune 500 companies alike. Through multimodal APIs—spanning real-time interactions, text-to-speech (TTS), speech generation, and image generation—we enable users to harness the full potential of diverse AI modalities effectively and at scale.

About the Role: We are seeking an Engineering Manager to lead our multimodal API product suite. Your team will be responsible for delivering innovative APIs across real-time processing, speech transcription, speech generation, and image creation. You will own the product roadmap for how we evolve our multimodal API offerings, and you will build the products that allow developers to reach millions of end users through AI audio, video, and images.

In this role, you will:

• Build, mentor, and grow a high-performing engineering team focused on multimodal API products – including our realtime API, our transcription models (Whisper), our speech generation models (TTS), and our image generation APIs (DALLE and native 4o).

• Collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to define the strategic vision and product roadmap.

• Work closely with our research teams to improve our core multimodal models for API customer use cases.

• Guide technical and architectural decisions, emphasizing scalability, robustness, and user experience.

• Foster a culture of innovation, continuous improvement, and accountability within your team.

Qualifications:

• Proven experience managing engineering teams that deliver complex, high-quality products at scale.

• Strong technical background and proficiency in modern software engineering practices and system architecture.

• Excellent collaboration and communication skills to effectively coordinate across diverse teams and stakeholders.

• Familiarity with or strong interest in multimodal AI, including speech technologies, real-time systems, and image generation.

• Ability to operate effectively in a fast-paced, ambiguous startup environment.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience developing multimodal systems or APIs in AI/ML domains, especially around image generation, audio generation, or speech transcription.

• Familiarity with real-time streaming technologies, audio processing, and computer vision.

• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms and distributed architectures.

Location:

This role is in-person at our San Francisco office.

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.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affimative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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