Senior Multimodal API Engineer

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a seasoned software engineer for the API Multimodal organization in San Francisco. You will design, build, and operate the backend services behind OpenAI’s image, audio, and real-time APIs, owning projects end to end from design to launch.

You will work across model integration, API design, and production infrastructure, collaborating with Research, Inference, and Safety to bring frontier capabilities to developers at scale.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional backend or platform engineering.
• Experience designing, building, and operating production backend services and APIs.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, latency, observability, and reliability.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, Rust, or TypeScript.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship developer-facing APIs and backend services for multimodal models.
• Architect low-latency streaming, session, and model integration systems.
• Collaborate with Research, Inference, and Safety to productionize new model capabilities.
• Own availability, latency, scalability, and cost efficiency of services.

Skills

Backend development

Distributed systems

APIs

Python

Go

Rust

TypeScript

Tools

Cloud platforms

Job description

OpenAI is seeking a seasoned software engineer for the API Multimodal organization in San Francisco. You will design, build, and operate the backend services behind OpenAI’s image, audio, and real-time APIs, owning projects end to end from design to launch.

You will work across model integration, API design, and production infrastructure, collaborating with Research, Inference, and Safety to bring frontier capabilities to developers at scale.