Engineering Manager, Multimodal (API)
Engineering Manager · Manager · Full Time
Opens OpenAI's application page
Role
What you'll do.
Lead a high-impact engineering team responsible for OpenAI's multimodal API product suite, including real-time APIs, speech transcription (Whisper), text-to-speech generation (TTS), and image creation (DALLE, GPT-4o). This role combines technical leadership with strategic product ownership, requiring deep expertise in AI systems, API scalability, and team management to drive innovation across audio, video, and image modalities serving millions of developers globally.
Responsibilities
- Team Leadership and Development: Build, mentor, and grow a high-performing engineering team focused on multimodal API products including the realtime API, Whisper transcription models, TTS speech generation models, and DALLE/GPT-4o image generation APIs. Establish clear performance metrics, provide regular feedback, conduct career development planning, and create an environment where engineers can do their best work at scale.
- Product Roadmap and Strategy: Own the product roadmap for multimodal API evolution, defining strategic priorities and feature direction. Work closely with product managers, designers, and research teams to translate market needs and technical possibilities into actionable development plans that enable developers to reach millions of end users.
- Technical Architecture and Decision Making: Guide technical and architectural decisions with emphasis on scalability, robustness, and developer experience. Establish engineering standards, best practices, and review processes that ensure production-quality code handling complex AI/ML workloads across distributed systems.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate closely with research teams to improve core multimodal models for API customer use cases. Coordinate with product, design, infrastructure, and go-to-market teams to align on priorities, timelines, and success metrics that drive platform adoption and customer satisfaction.
- Innovation and Culture Building: Foster a culture of innovation, continuous improvement, and accountability within your team. Encourage experimentation with new AI modalities and technologies while maintaining high engineering standards and promoting knowledge sharing across the organization.
Qualifications
What we look for.
Technical
System Architecture and Design
Demonstrated expertise in designing and scaling complex distributed systems, APIs, and microservices architectures that handle high throughput and low-latency requirements critical for AI model serving and real-time processing.
AI/ML Platform Experience
Strong technical foundation in machine learning operations, model serving infrastructure, and deployment patterns. Understanding of how to optimize ML models for production APIs, including batching, inference optimization, and resource allocation.
API Design and Developer Experience
Proven expertise building and shipping production APIs at scale. Understanding of API versioning, backward compatibility, rate limiting, authentication, monitoring, and other considerations critical for developer-facing products used by thousands of applications.
Modern Software Engineering Practices
Proficiency in contemporary development methodologies including continuous integration/deployment, automated testing, code review processes, and infrastructure-as-code. Ability to establish engineering standards that balance velocity with quality.
Education
Computer Science or Engineering Foundation
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience demonstrating deep understanding of core computer science principles, algorithms, and system design.
Experience
Engineering Team Management
Proven track record managing engineering teams of varying sizes that delivered complex, high-quality products at scale. Demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and retain top technical talent while maintaining team productivity and morale.
Multimodal AI or ML Systems
Direct experience developing multimodal systems or APIs in AI/ML domains, particularly with image generation, audio generation, speech transcription, or related modalities. Understanding of the unique challenges in building production systems around diverse AI model types.
Real-time Systems and Audio Processing
Familiarity with real-time streaming technologies, audio processing fundamentals, computer vision concepts, and the engineering patterns required to build low-latency systems handling concurrent user sessions.
Cloud and Distributed Infrastructure
Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and distributed architectures including containerization, orchestration, and infrastructure automation at scale to support millions of API requests.
Skills
Required
Engineering Leadership
Strong ability to lead, mentor, and inspire engineering teams. Experience setting technical vision, establishing best practices, conducting code reviews, and fostering a culture of continuous learning and excellence.
System Design and Scalability
Expert-level understanding of designing systems for scale, including load balancing, caching strategies, database optimization, and handling thousands of concurrent requests with minimal latency.
API Development
Proven expertise designing and implementing production APIs, including RESTful and real-time streaming protocols, with deep understanding of developer experience, documentation, SDKs, and API versioning strategies.
Cross-functional Communication
Excellent ability to communicate technical concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders, coordinate effectively across product/design/research teams, and build consensus on priorities and decisions.
Fast-paced Environment Navigation
Demonstrated ability to thrive in ambiguous, rapidly evolving environments typical of AI-driven organizations. Comfortable with incomplete information, able to make sound decisions quickly, and adaptable to changing priorities.
Preferred
Multimodal AI Systems
Nice to haveHands-on experience building or operating systems that integrate multiple AI modalities such as vision, audio, and language. Understanding of the unique infrastructure and model serving challenges these systems present.
Speech Recognition and Synthesis Technologies
Nice to haveFamiliarity with speech-to-text systems, text-to-speech generation, audio codec optimization, or related audio processing technologies that power real-time communication platforms.
Image Generation and Computer Vision
Nice to haveBackground with generative image models, computer vision infrastructure, or visual content generation systems. Understanding of model quality assessment, latency optimization, and GPU resource management.
Large-scale ML Infrastructure
Nice to haveExperience with machine learning infrastructure, model deployment platforms, GPU cluster management, and ML Ops tools. Familiarity with serving models at massive scale with sub-100ms latency requirements.
Open Source and Developer Communities
Nice to haveActive participation in or leadership of developer communities, contributions to open-source projects, or demonstrated ability to build products that developers love and advocate for within their networks.
Tech stack
Languages
Frameworks
Databases
Tools
Other
Compensation
Pay and benefits.
Base·USD 293,000 – 385,000
Equity·Stock options
Benefits
Equity Compensation
Competitive stock options as part of total compensation package, allowing engineers to participate in company growth and success. Stock grants typically vest over 4-year periods with standard 1-year cliffs.
Health and Wellness Benefits
Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with company contributions. Mental health support, wellness programs, and fitness benefits to support employee wellbeing.
Retirement Planning
401(k) retirement plan with employer matching contributions, helping employees plan for long-term financial security.
Paid Time Off
Generous paid time off including vacation days, sick leave, and company holidays. Flexible time off policies encouraging work-life balance and employee recovery.
Learning and Development
Professional development opportunities including conference attendance, training programs, and learning resources to stay current with rapidly evolving AI/ML technologies and engineering best practices.
In-person Collaboration
Modern San Francisco office with state-of-the-art facilities, collaboration spaces, and comfortable work environment designed for high-performing engineering teams.
Relocation Assistance
Relocation support and assistance for candidates relocating to San Francisco to join OpenAI's headquarters.
Process
Interview steps.
- 01
Initial Screening Call
Brief conversation with OpenAI's recruitment team to assess background, motivation for joining, and alignment with the role's requirements. Expect questions about management philosophy and experience scaling API products.
- 02
Technical Deep Dive
Detailed technical interview with engineering leadership covering system design, architectural decisions, API scalability patterns, and experience with ML model serving infrastructure. Come prepared to discuss specific projects where you managed complex technical decisions.
- 03
Leadership and Collaboration Assessment
Conversation with members of the multimodal API team or peer managers assessing leadership approach, team development philosophy, cross-functional collaboration abilities, and cultural alignment with OpenAI's mission-driven environment.
- 04
Product and Strategy Discussion
Interview with product leadership discussing how you approach product strategy, prioritization, developer experience, and market fit. Be prepared to discuss how you would evolve the multimodal API portfolio.
- 05
Executive Leadership Interview
Meeting with senior leadership to assess long-term vision, strategic thinking, communication clarity, and ability to operate effectively within OpenAI's organizational structure and culture.
- 06
Final Decision Round
Culminating discussion covering compensation alignment, role expectations, team dynamics, and ensuring mutual fit before offer extension. Opportunity to ask final questions about the role and company direction.
Full posting
Original listing.
About the Team:
OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. Our API is the industry's most widely adopted AI platform, empowering startups, indie developers, and Fortune 500 companies alike. Through multimodal APIs—spanning real-time interactions, text-to-speech (TTS), speech generation, and image generation—we enable users to harness the full potential of diverse AI modalities effectively and at scale.
About the Role:
We are seeking an Engineering Manager to lead our multimodal API product suite. Your team will be responsible for delivering innovative APIs across real-time processing, speech transcription, speech generation, and image creation. You will own the product roadmap for how we evolve our multimodal API offerings, and you will build the products that allow developers to reach millions of end users through AI audio, video, and images.
In this role, you will:
Build, mentor, and grow a high-performing engineering team focused on multimodal API products – including our realtime API, our transcription models (Whisper), our speech generation models (TTS), and our image generation APIs (DALLE and native 4o).
Collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and other stakeholders to define the strategic vision and product roadmap.
Work closely with our research teams to improve our core multimodal models for API customer use cases.
Guide technical and architectural decisions, emphasizing scalability, robustness, and user experience.
Foster a culture of innovation, continuous improvement, and accountability within your team.
Qualifications:
Proven experience managing engineering teams that deliver complex, high-quality products at scale.
Strong technical background and proficiency in modern software engineering practices and system architecture.
Excellent collaboration and communication skills to effectively coordinate across diverse teams and stakeholders.
Familiarity with or strong interest in multimodal AI, including speech technologies, real-time systems, and image generation.
Ability to operate effectively in a fast-paced, ambiguous startup environment.
Preferred Qualifications:
Experience developing multimodal systems or APIs in AI/ML domains, especially around image generation, audio generation, or speech transcription.
Familiarity with real-time streaming technologies, audio processing, and computer vision.
Hands-on experience with cloud platforms and distributed architectures.
Location:
This role is in-person at our San Francisco office.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.
We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
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