Multimodal API Backend Engineer

OpenAI; California (MO); On-site; USD 190,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a senior software engineer for the API Multimodal team. You will design, build, and operate production backend services and developer-facing APIs powering image, audio, and real-time multimodal APIs.

You will own projects end-to-end, collaborating with Research, Inference, and Safety to bring frontier model capabilities into reliable developer experiences. The role emphasizes strong systems fundamentals, ownership, and the ability to translate complex capabilities into clear,

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional backend/infrastructure experience.
• Design, build, and operate production backend services and APIs.
• Experience leading technically complex projects from idea to production.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship developer-facing APIs and backend services that serve frontier models.
• Architect low-latency streaming, session, and model integration systems.
• Collaborate with Research to deploy new model capabilities and iterate from feedback.
• Own availability, latency, scalability, and cost of services you build.
• Lead projects from design through launch and ongoing iteration, raising engineering standards.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

APIs

Python

Go

Rust

TypeScript

System design

Latency

Observability

Job description

OpenAI is seeking a senior software engineer for the API Multimodal team. You will design, build, and operate production backend services and developer-facing APIs powering image, audio, and real-time multimodal APIs.

You will own projects end-to-end, collaborating with Research, Inference, and Safety to bring frontier model capabilities into reliable developer experiences. The role emphasizes strong systems fundamentals, ownership, and the ability to translate complex capabilities into clear,