Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Multimodal APIs sit at the intersection of developer platforms and productised AI, where reliability, latency, and clear interfaces matter as much as model capability. This Engineering Manager role is notable because it centers on an API suite that spans real time interactions, speech, and image generation, a surface area increasingly common in modern SaaS offerings that embed AI as a core feature rather than an add on.
For a SaaS career, the role offers durable experience in building and evolving platform products that other teams and external customers depend on. Leading roadmap execution across multiple modalities develops instincts around versioning, backwards compatibility, developer experience, and operational rigor, all of which transfer to API first SaaS businesses. The close connection to research and product counterparts also reflects how many SaaS companies now ship ML driven capabilities through stable product abstractions.
This position fits managers who enjoy balancing people leadership with architectural decision making, and who are comfortable translating ambiguous technical possibilities into shippable platform increments. It will resonate with professionals who want their management scope to include cross functional alignment and long horizon platform stewardship, not just delivery of isolated features.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
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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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.
