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OpenAI's API Frontiers team is seeking a backend software engineer to build and operate the services powering the Responses API, which connects frontier AI models to developers for production use. You will design and operate APIs and backend services that bring cutting-edge model capabilities to developers, partner with Research, Safety, and other teams to define API behavior and execute safe, staged launches, and build capabilities for agent workflows including task delegation, context sharing, and parallel execution.
Key responsibilities include strengthening long-running request reliability across timeouts, cancellation, streaming, and background execution; improving request-processing performance and tail latency through profiling, efficient systems code, and persistent connections; turning developer feedback and production failures into better observability, diagnostics, and lasting product improvements; and taking ownership of ambiguous technical problems from definition through shipping and iteration.
You will work closely with Research, Safety, Codex, and API teams to bring new model capabilities into production and improve them through developer feedback. The role combines distributed systems engineering with product judgment: designing useful developer interfaces, managing staged rollouts, and following production issues through to durable fixes.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of experience building and operating backend services or developer-facing APIs in production
- Strong software engineering fundamentals with practical knowledge of distributed systems, concurrency, and asynchronous execution
- Ability to diagnose production failures and performance bottlenecks using observability data and profiling
- Product judgment and developer empathy, with a track record of translating complex capabilities into clear, dependable APIs
- Experience taking ownership of ambiguous technical problems from defining an approach through shipping and improving the result
- Clear communication and effective collaboration across engineering, research, product, and safety disciplines
- Plus: experience with Rust, streaming protocols or WebSockets, or long-running workflow systems
