Engineering Manager, API Agents

About the Team

OpenAI's API Agents Team builds external APIs that allow developers to create agentic workflows using our reasoning models. The team deploys flagship models and products like O1, Realtime API, and Assistants API and contributes to developer focused model improvements through collaboration with our Post Training teams.

We work with API developers to gather feedback on how our models are performing on different tool actions and work together with research to improve our models across modalities such as video, audio, and text. Our goal is to develop scalable agentic API offerings that leverage OpenAI model intelligence and expand our tool use offerings.

We're looking for a tech lead manager to build teams in a deeply iterative, collaborative, fast-paced environment to bring our technology to millions of developers around the world, and ensure it’s delivered with safety and reliability in mind.

In this role, you will:

• Directly manage ICs / MLEs on API Agents, a core part of the API organization. You will collaborate with product managers, researchers, and the rest of our engineering team to build new APIs around emerging research capabilities and unsolved customer needs.

• Build and grow high performing teams in a deeply iterative, collaborative, fast-paced environment to bring our technology to millions of developers around the world, and ensure its delivered with safety and reliability in mind. 

• Be responsible for the team that will architect, build, and design our agentic APIs. This will include ensuring our APIs effectively expose tool use, function calling, and structured outputs. 

• Iterate rapidly to improve the developer experience both for external developers as well as partner research teams while advancing scalability, performance, observability, and security.

• Understand model intelligence gaps and work with the team to build evals and partner with research to develop a technical and research roadmap and prioritization.

• Help drive high leverage projects for our team and ensure our team engagement is high. Work to ensure that team, technical, and organizational blockers are resolved and milestones are delivered.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• 8+ years of industry experience and 4+ years of experience in managing and leading engineering or research teams, with a proven ability to mentor and grow engineering talent.

• Experience being a hands-on individual contributor, while simultaneously managing a high performing team.

• Demonstrated ability to drive complex, cross-team engineering and research projects and lead collaboration across different functions.

• Have experience hiring, coaching, and inspiring senior engineers or other TLs. 

• Are willing to both own important research problems end-to-end, but also have good delegation skills and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done. 

• Are strongly motivated by OpenAI’s mission of building safe, universally beneficial AGI and are aligned with OpenAI’s charter 

• Stay goal-oriented instead of method-oriented, and are not afraid of tedious but high-value work when needed. Are a team player who enjoys collaborative work environments.

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 do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status. 

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For US Based Candidates: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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.