OpenAI
Software Engineer, API Frontiers
$266K–$445K
New York City +1 · Hybrid · Full-time · Posted Sep 11, 2026
- Location
- New York City
San Francisco - Experience
- 5+ years building and operating backend services or developer-facing APIs in production.
About the job
Build and operate backend services for the Responses API, bringing frontier model capabilities to developers and making agent workflows reliable and fast.
What you'll do
- Design and operate APIs and backend services; define API behavior and deliver safe, staged launches with partner teams.
- Build agent workflow capabilities and improve reliability for long-running requests, including timeouts, cancellation, streaming, and background execution.
- Improve performance, observability, and diagnostics; turn developer feedback and production failures into durable fixes.
What they ask for
- Strong software engineering fundamentals and 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, including translating complex capabilities into clear, dependable APIs.
- Ownership of ambiguous technical problems from defining an approach through shipping and improvement; clear communication and collaboration.
Nice to have
- Experience with Rust, streaming protocols or WebSockets, or long-running workflow systems.
Pay
$266K – $445K (USD, base salary)
Tools
Responses API, Rust, WebSockets
AI focus
Bring frontier model capabilities into production APIs and build API capabilities for agent workflows, including task delegation, context sharing, and parallel execution.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative