Software Engineer, API Multimodal

Details

API Multimodal builds developer-facing products and infrastructure that bring image, audio, and real-time model capabilities to developers. The team operates high-scale APIs for image generation, speech transcription, speech generation, and low-latency voice interactions, partnering with Research and Inference to bring frontier model capabilities into production.

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 for reliable multimodal interactions at scale.
• Work with Research to bring new model capabilities into production and shape the surrounding systems.
• Incorporate feedback from real-world developers and customers.
• Own the availability, latency, scalability, and cost efficiency of services.
• Own projects from technical design and implementation through launch and ongoing iteration.
• Raise the team's engineering standards.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional experience, excluding internships, in backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering roles.
• Experience 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 the 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.
• Model training experience is not required.

Benefits

• Base salary of $293,000–$385,000 per year.
• Equity and performance-related bonuses for eligible employees.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health, dependent care, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, company holidays, office closures, and paid sick or safe time.
• Mental health and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily office meals and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional taxable fringe benefits, including charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.

OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer committed to reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities. Background checks will be administered in accordance with applicable law.