Software Engineer, API Multimodal

Ritual Ads ®; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a software engineer on API Multimodal to build and operate the products and distributed systems behind our image, audio, and real-time APIs. You will work across model integration, API design, and production infrastructure to turn cutting-edge research into reliable developer experiences.

You will own projects end to end, collaborating with Research, Inference, and Safety, and be responsible for availability, latency, scalability, and cost.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional experience in backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering roles.
• Track record 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.

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.
• Collaborate with Research to bring new model capabilities into production and shape the systems around them.
• 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.

Skills

API design

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

Python

Go

Rust

TypeScript

Job description

About the Team

API Multimodal builds the developer-facing products and infrastructure that bring OpenAI’s image, audio, and real-time model capabilities into the world. We are responsible for high-scale APIs for image generation, speech transcription, speech generation, and low-latency voice interactions. We partner closely with Research and Inference to bring frontier model capabilities to developers and use customer feedback to improve our models.

About the Role

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.

In this role, you will:

• 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.

Your background might look something like:

• 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.
• Experience with real-time streaming, audio processing, speech systems, image generation, computer vision, or multimodal AI applications is helpful, but not required.

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 Affirmative 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. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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