Build and operate high-scale APIs and distributed systems for OpenAI's image, audio, and real-time multimodal models. Design low-latency infrastructure, integrate frontier research into production, and own availability, scalability, and developer experience. Requires 7+ years in backend or infrastructure engineering.
293k – 385k/yr
On-site7+ YOEBackend Engineering
About the role
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 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.
Requirements
7+ years of professional experience, excluding internships, in backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering roles.
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.
Strong sense of ownership, comfort with ambiguity, and a bias toward learning directly from users while continuously improving engineering quality.
Nice-to-Haves
Experience with real-time streaming, audio processing, speech systems, image generation, computer vision, or multimodal AI applications.
Skills
PythonGoRustTypeScriptDistributed SystemsAPIslow-latency streamingObservabilityComputer Visionmultimodal ai
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