Engineering Manager, Multimodal (API)

Slope; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading AI technology company in San Francisco is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the multimodal API product suite. You will build and mentor a high-performing engineering team responsible for innovative API products across speech generation, transcription, and image creation. Ideal candidates have strong management experience and a background in multimodal AI technologies. This position emphasizes collaboration with diverse teams and fostering a culture of innovation and accountability.

Qualifications

• Proven experience managing engineering teams that deliver complex, high-quality products.
• Strong technical background and proficiency in modern software engineering practices.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills.
• Familiarity with or strong interest in multimodal AI technologies.
• Ability to operate effectively in a fast-paced, ambiguous startup environment.

Responsibilities

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

Skills

Team management

Technical background

Collaboration

Understanding of multimodal AI

Adaptability in fast-paced environments

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.

OpenAI’s Aff… Policy Statement.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.