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Software Engineer, API Frontiers

OpenAI· Core Product & Platform
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Hybrid (New York City), Hybrid (San Francisco)Full-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

Backend software engineer role focused on building and operating the services behind the Responses API, shaping API behavior, and delivering frontier model capabilities to developers with emphasis on safety, reliability, and speed.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and operate APIs and backend services that bring frontier model capabilities to developers.
  • Partner with Research, Safety, Codex, and API teams to define API behavior and deliver safe, staged launches.
  • Build API capabilities for agent workflows, including task delegation, context sharing, and parallel execution.
  • Strengthen long-running request reliability across timeouts, cancellation, streaming, and background execution.
  • Improve request-processing performance and tail latency through profiling, efficient systems code, and persistent connections.
  • Turn developer feedback and production failures into better observability, diagnostics, and lasting product improvements.

Qualifications

  • 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.
  • Experience with Rust, streaming protocols or WebSockets, or long-running workflow systems is a plus.

Benefits

  • Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
  • Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
  • 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
  • Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
  • Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
  • 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time
  • Mental health and wellness support
  • Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
  • Annual learning and development stipend
  • Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
  • Relocation support for eligible employees
  • Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends
Last updated Sep 17, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About OpenAI

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