About this role
Designing, building, and operating the backend systems that power image generation and editing experiences in ChatGPT constitutes the core daily focus for this team. Engineers create scalable APIs, services, and distributed infrastructure capable of supporting billions of image generations while optimizing reliability, latency, throughput, and system cost.
The Image Generation group operates within OpenAI to bridge research, infrastructure, and product development, enabling hundreds of millions of global users to transform visual content using multimodal AI models. Collaboration happens daily with researchers, product managers, designers, and mobile engineering teams to productionize new capabilities safely and rapidly.
Candidates joining this group should bring a strong background in large-scale backend or distributed systems and a desire to navigate ambiguity in fast-moving environments. Success in the position requires deep analytical skills, comfort with modern cloud-native architectures, and a genuine curiosity for translating advanced AI research into reliable production products.
What you will do
- 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.
What you need
- Demonstrated experience building and operating large-scale backend or distributed systems.
- Strong proficiency in modern backend technologies and cloud-native architectures.
- Experience designing APIs, service-oriented architectures, and highly reliable production systems.
- High analytical capability with a track record of using data to inform technical and product decisions.
- Strong sense of ownership and ability to navigate ambiguity in fast-moving environments.
Benefits
- Offers Equity
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the salary range for this role?
The position offers a salary range of $185K to $305K alongside equity offerings.
Where is the role located?
The position is based in San Francisco.
What does the Image Generation team actually do?
The team works at the intersection of research, infrastructure, and product to build the systems that power image generation at global scale. They enable users to create, edit, and transform images through natural language via ChatGPT.