# Software Engineer, API Multimodal

**Company:** [OpenAI](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/openai)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $293k – $385k/yr
**Experience:** 7+ years
**Skills:** Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript, Distributed Systems, APIs, low-latency streaming, Observability, Computer Vision, multimodal ai
**Posted:** 2026-07-31

> 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.

## Job Description

## 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.

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