Software Engineer, API Multimodal
$266k - $445k • Remote • San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 2mo ago
Job Location
San Francisco
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
Fully remote
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
Applied AI Engineer
About the job
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, where 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.
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 and intuitive multimodal interactions at scale.
- Collaborate with Research to productionize new model capabilities, shape surrounding systems, and incorporate feedback from developers and customers.
- Ensure the availability, latency, scalability, and cost efficiency of built services.
- Own projects from technical design and implementation through launch and ongoing iteration, while improving team engineering standards.
Requirements
- 7+ years of professional experience in backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering roles.
- Proven 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.
- Proficiency in one or more general-purpose backend languages (e.g., Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript).
- Experience building reliable, scalable systems and reasoning about distributed architecture, concurrency, latency, observability, and operational tradeoffs.
- Product judgment and developer empathy, with the ability to translate complex capabilities into clear APIs.
- Clear communication and a collaborative approach.
- Strong sense of ownership, comfort with ambiguity, and a bias toward learning from users.
- Experience with real-time streaming, audio processing, speech systems, image generation, computer vision, or multimodal AI applications is helpful but not required.