Software Engineer, API Multimodal

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.