# Software Engineer, API Frontiers
**Company:** [OpenAI](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/openai)
Backend software engineer role at OpenAI's API Frontiers team, responsible for designing and operating production APIs that bring frontier AI models to developers. You'll combine distributed systems engineering with product judgment to build reliable, high-performance agent workflows while partnering with research, safety, and product teams. Requires 5+ years of backend services experience, strong distributed systems fundamentals, and proven ability to translate complex capabilities into developer-friendly APIs.
**Role:** Backend Engineer
**Seniority:** Senior
**Locations:** New York City
**Salary:** 266000–445000 USD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/b6a86e39-8059-4ccf-8d33-1bf5bd92fa86)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/openai/software-engineer-api-frontiers
---
## Responsibilities

- Design and Operate Production APIs: Architect, build, and operate backend services that safely expose frontier model capabilities through the Responses API, ensuring high availability and performance standards for developer-facing infrastructure.
- Cross-Functional Model Integration: Partner with Research, Safety, Codex, and API teams to define API specifications, implement staged rollouts, and bring new model capabilities from research into production environments.
- Agent Workflow Architecture: Develop API capabilities for sophisticated agentic use cases including task delegation, context sharing, parallel execution, and state management across distributed systems.
- Long-Running Request Reliability: Engineer robust systems handling timeouts, cancellation semantics, streaming protocols, and background execution to ensure dependable behavior for extended agent workflows.
- Performance Optimization: Optimize request-processing performance and reduce tail latency through systematic profiling, efficient systems-level code, persistent connection management, and resource pooling.
- Production Operations and Diagnostics: Monitor production systems, diagnose failures through observability tools, implement lasting improvements based on developer feedback, and establish clear diagnostic pathways for production issues.

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Computer Science or Related Field","description":"Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent professional experience demonstrating mastery of core systems concepts and software engineering practices."}

### technical

- {"name":"Distributed Systems Design","description":"Practical expertise in designing fault-tolerant distributed systems with deep understanding of consistency models, consensus mechanisms, and state synchronization across services."}
- {"name":"Concurrency and Asynchronous Programming","description":"Strong knowledge of concurrent programming patterns, async/await models, event-driven architectures, and handling race conditions in high-throughput scenarios."}
- {"name":"Production API Development","description":"Demonstrated experience building and operating production-grade APIs with focus on developer experience, error handling, versioning strategies, and backward compatibility."}
- {"name":"Systems Performance Analysis","description":"Ability to use profiling tools, metrics instrumentation, and flame graphs to identify bottlenecks, diagnose latency issues, and optimize resource utilization in complex systems."}
- {"name":"Backend Service Architecture","description":"Experience with service-oriented architectures, microservices patterns, load balancing, caching strategies, connection pooling, and database optimization techniques."}
- {"name":"Observability and Monitoring","description":"Hands-on experience implementing comprehensive logging, distributed tracing, metrics collection, and alerting to enable production monitoring and incident response."}

### experience

- {"name":"Backend Services Development","description":"5+ years of professional experience building, deploying, and maintaining backend services or developer-facing APIs in production environments handling significant scale and traffic."}
- {"name":"Production Troubleshooting","description":"Track record of diagnosing and resolving production failures, performance bottlenecks, and reliability issues using observability data, logs, and systematic debugging techniques."}
- {"name":"API Design and Developer Advocacy","description":"Proven ability to translate complex technical capabilities into clear, intuitive, and well-documented APIs; demonstrated product judgment and empathy for developer needs."}
- {"name":"Ownership and Ambiguity","description":"Experience taking full ownership of technically ambiguous problems from problem definition through implementation, testing, deployment, and iterative improvement."}
- {"name":"Cross-Functional Collaboration","description":"Strong history of effective communication and collaboration across engineering, research, product management, and safety-focused teams in complex environments."}

## Skills

### required

- {"name":"Backend API Architecture","description":"Expertise in RESTful API design, request/response handling, error semantics, rate limiting, and creating scalable developer-facing services."}
- {"name":"Distributed Systems Fundamentals","description":"Deep understanding of consistency, availability, partition tolerance (CAP theorem), eventual consistency, and practical implications for production systems."}
- {"name":"Production Debugging and Observability","description":"Proficiency with debugging tools, log analysis, distributed tracing, metrics visualization, and systematic approaches to diagnosing production issues."}
- {"name":"Asynchronous Systems Design","description":"Experience building non-blocking systems, event-driven architectures, callback handling, and managing complex execution flows in high-concurrency environments."}
- {"name":"Systems Performance Engineering","description":"Hands-on experience with performance profiling, optimization, latency analysis, throughput measurement, and resource efficiency optimization."}

### preferred

- {"name":"Rust Systems Programming","description":"Experience with Rust for building high-performance, memory-safe backend systems and APIs, particularly relevant for performance-critical infrastructure components."}
- {"name":"Streaming Protocols and WebSockets","description":"Practical experience implementing or working with streaming protocols, WebSocket connections, Server-Sent Events (SSE), or real-time bidirectional communication systems."}
- {"name":"Long-Running Workflow Systems","description":"Background with workflow orchestration, state machines, distributed job scheduling, or systems designed for managing long-running asynchronous tasks."}
- {"name":"Staged Rollout and Experimentation","description":"Experience implementing canary deployments, A/B testing infrastructure, feature flags, and sophisticated rollout strategies for production deployments."}
- {"name":"AI/ML Infrastructure","description":"Familiarity with serving machine learning models at scale, inference optimization, model versioning, and the unique challenges of production AI systems."}

## Tech stack

### tools

- {"name":"Prometheus","description":"Metrics collection and monitoring system essential for observability and understanding production system behavior."}
- {"name":"Grafana","description":"Visualization platform for metrics and time-series data, enabling dashboards for monitoring production performance."}
- {"name":"DataDog/New Relic","description":"Comprehensive observability platforms for distributed tracing, log aggregation, and end-to-end production monitoring."}
- {"name":"Jaeger","description":"Distributed tracing system for understanding request flows across microservices and identifying performance bottlenecks."}
- {"name":"Docker","description":"Containerization platform for packaging, deploying, and managing backend services consistently across environments."}

### others

- {"name":"Load Testing and Benchmarking","description":"Tools like k6, JMeter, or custom benchmarking harnesses for stress testing APIs and validating performance characteristics."}
- {"name":"CI/CD Pipelines","description":"Automated testing, deployment, and rollout infrastructure for managing staged deployments and rapid iteration."}
- {"name":"Request Streaming Protocols","description":"Understanding of HTTP/2, Server-Sent Events (SSE), WebSockets, and multiplexing for real-time communication patterns."}

### databases

- {"name":"PostgreSQL","description":"Robust relational database commonly used for state management, reliable transactions, and operational data in production systems."}
- {"name":"Redis","description":"In-memory data store for caching, session management, rate limiting, and real-time data structures in high-performance systems."}
- {"name":"DynamoDB","description":"Serverless NoSQL database option for high-scale, low-latency data access patterns common in modern cloud infrastructure."}

### languages

- {"name":"Python","description":"Commonly used at OpenAI for backend services, scripting, and API development; valuable for rapid iteration and systems integration."}
- {"name":"Rust","description":"Preferred for performance-critical components, memory-safe systems code, and high-throughput API services without garbage collection overhead."}
- {"name":"Go","description":"Excellent choice for distributed systems, microservices, and building concurrent backend services with strong standard library support."}
- {"name":"TypeScript/Node.js","description":"Useful for API development, real-time systems, and JavaScript ecosystem compatibility for developer-facing tools."}

### frameworks

- {"name":"FastAPI","description":"Modern Python web framework for building high-performance APIs with automatic documentation and async support."}
- {"name":"gRPC","description":"High-performance RPC framework for internal service communication, streaming, and low-latency distributed systems communication."}
- {"name":"Axum/Tokio","description":"Rust async runtime and web framework for building scalable, concurrent backend services with excellent performance characteristics."}
- {"name":"Kubernetes","description":"Container orchestration platform for managing distributed backend services, scaling, and managing deployment infrastructure."}

## Benefits

### benefits

- {"name":"Competitive Health and Wellness","description":"Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage; mental health support; wellness programs; and fitness reimbursement to support holistic employee wellbeing."}
- {"name":"Equity Compensation","description":"Meaningful stock options aligning employee interests with company success, providing long-term wealth creation opportunities at a leading AI research company."}
- {"name":"Professional Development and Learning","description":"Access to cutting-edge AI research, internal technical talks, conference attendance budgets, and opportunities to grow expertise in frontier AI systems and production infrastructure."}
- {"name":"Flexible Work Environment","description":"Flexible work arrangements supporting work-life balance, remote flexibility options, and trust-based management culture emphasizing outcomes over presence."}
- {"name":"Generous Time Off","description":"Competitive paid time off, unlimited sick leave, and sabbatical programs allowing engineers to recharge and pursue personal development."}
- {"name":"Retirement Planning","description":"401(k) matching and retirement savings programs helping employees build long-term financial security."}
- {"name":"Parental and Family Support","description":"Comprehensive parental leave, fertility benefits, family planning support, and adoption assistance for employees at different life stages."}
- {"name":"Impact and Innovation Culture","description":"Opportunity to work on frontier AI systems with significant real-world impact, collaborating with world-class researchers and engineers on cutting-edge technology."}

## Compensation

- **max:** 350000
- **min:** 200000
- **currency:** USD
- **stockOptions:** true

## Interview process

### steps

- {"name":"Initial Phone Screening","description":"Preliminary conversation with recruiter to discuss background, career trajectory, interest in the API Frontiers team, and high-level technical experience with distributed systems and backend services."}
- {"name":"Systems Design Conversation","description":"Technical discussion with an engineer on the API Frontiers team focusing on designing scalable backend services, handling reliability challenges, and making architectural trade-offs relevant to the Responses API."}
- {"name":"Distributed Systems Deep Dive","description":"In-depth technical interview covering concurrency patterns, failure scenarios, performance optimization techniques, and practical approaches to debugging production issues in complex systems."}
- {"name":"Production Experience Discussion","description":"Focused conversation on specific examples from your career: production incidents you've debugged, performance optimizations you've implemented, and challenges translating developer needs into API designs."}
- {"name":"Collaboration and Communication Assessment","description":"Interview with cross-functional team members (Research, Product, or Safety) to evaluate ability to work across disciplines, communicate complex technical concepts, and incorporate feedback from diverse perspectives."}
- {"name":"Final Round with Leadership","description":"Conversation with team leadership to discuss career goals, vision for the Responses API, and how you approach ownership of ambiguous technical challenges."}

## Full description
**About the Team**

API Frontiers turns OpenAI’s frontier models into production APIs that developers can use to build reliable products and agents. We own the core path connecting models to developers through the Responses API, with a focus on safety, reliability, and speed. Working closely with Research, Safety, Codex, and other API teams, we bring new model capabilities into production and improve them through developer feedback.

**About the Role**

We are looking for a backend software engineer to build and operate the services behind the Responses API. You will shape API behavior, bring new capabilities from research into production, and make long-running agent workflows dependable and fast. The work combines distributed systems engineering with product judgment: designing useful developer interfaces, managing staged rollouts, and following production issues through to durable fixes.

**In this role, you will:**

* 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.

**Your background might look something like:**

* 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.

**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](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf).

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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through [this form](https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA). No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this [link](https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241).

[OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf)

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.