Backend Software Engineer, ChatGPT ImageGen

About the Team

The ChatGPT organization at OpenAI supports our mission by bringing advanced AI capabilities to hundreds of millions of users worldwide. The Image Generation team is responsible for one of the fastest-growing experiences in ChatGPT, enabling users to create, edit, and transform images through natural language. Recent advances in our multimodal image models have dramatically improved image quality, instruction following, editing precision, consistency, and text rendering, unlocking entirely new creative and professional workflows.

We work at the intersection of research, infrastructure, and product to build the systems that power image generation at global scale. Our team partners closely with researchers, product engineers, designers, and platform teams to bring state-of-the-art image capabilities to millions of users while continuously pushing the boundaries of what AI-powered creation can do.

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced Backend Engineer to join the Image Generation team and help build the systems that power image creation and editing across ChatGPT.

You'll work on the core backend infrastructure that enables users to generate, edit, and iterate on visual content using cutting-edge multimodal AI models. This includes building highly scalable services, orchestration systems, APIs, storage platforms, and distributed infrastructure that support billions of image generations and editing workflows. You'll partner closely with product, research, and mobile teams to transform breakthrough AI capabilities into reliable, performant experiences used by millions around the world.

In this role, you will:

• Design, build, and operate backend systems that power image generation and image editing experiences in ChatGPT.

• Develop scalable APIs, services, and infrastructure that support multimodal AI workflows.

• Optimize reliability, latency, throughput, and cost across large-scale distributed systems.

• Partner with researchers to productionize new image generation capabilities and bring them to users quickly and safely.

• Collaborate closely with Android, iOS, web, and full-stack engineers to build seamless end-to-end product experiences.

• Drive technical architecture decisions across storage, serving, orchestration, and platform systems.

• Use data and experimentation to identify opportunities for improving user experience, performance, and system efficiency.

• Help shape engineering culture through technical leadership, mentorship, and operational excellence.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have experience building and operating large-scale backend or distributed systems.

• Have strong proficiency in modern backend technologies and cloud-native architectures.

• Enjoy working across the stack and partnering closely with product and research teams.

• Have experience designing APIs, service-oriented architectures, and highly reliable production systems.

• Are highly analytical and enjoy using data to inform technical and product decisions.

• Have a strong sense of ownership and are comfortable navigating ambiguity in fast-moving environments.

• Are excited by multimodal AI and the opportunity to help define the infrastructure powering the future of visual creation.

• Have a deep curiosity about how cutting-edge AI research can be translated into products that reach millions of users.

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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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.

Compensation Range: $185K - $305K