Description
Compensation
$266K – $445K • Offers Equity
The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following 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 (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
- Mental health and wellness support
- Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
- Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
- 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, may also be provided.
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.
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.
Requirements
- 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.