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API Multimodal is OpenAI's team responsible for building developer-facing products and infrastructure that bring image, audio, and real-time model capabilities to the world. The team operates high-scale APIs for image generation, speech transcription, speech generation, and low-latency voice interactions, partnering closely with Research and Inference teams to deliver frontier model capabilities to developers.
As a Software Engineer on API Multimodal, you will design, build, and operate the backend systems and distributed infrastructure powering OpenAI's image, audio, and real-time APIs. This is a hands-on role combining backend and systems engineering with product judgment. You will own projects end-to-end, from technical design through implementation, launch, and ongoing iteration.
Key responsibilities include:
- Designing and shipping developer-facing APIs and backend services that serve frontier models
- Architecting low-latency streaming, request, session, and model integration systems that make complex multimodal interactions reliable and intuitive at scale
- Working directly with Research to bring new model capabilities into production and incorporating real-world developer feedback
- Owning availability, latency, scalability, and cost efficiency of services you build
- Leading technically complex projects from ambiguous ideas to production while raising engineering standards
You bring 7+ years of professional backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering experience. You have a proven track record designing, building, and operating production backend services, developer-facing APIs, or distributed systems. You have strong software engineering fundamentals and experience leading complex projects from concept to production. You are proficient in backend languages like Python, Go, Rust, or TypeScript, and you understand distributed architecture, concurrency, latency, observability, and operational tradeoffs. You combine technical depth with product judgment and developer empathy—the ability to turn complex capabilities into clear, intuitive APIs. You communicate clearly, collaborate well across teams (researchers, product managers, designers, infrastructure engineers, customers), and have a strong sense of ownership with comfort navigating ambiguity. Experience with real-time streaming, audio processing, speech systems, image generation, computer vision, or multimodal AI is helpful but not required.
