Jobs / United States / OpenAI UK Ltd
Software Engineer, API Frontiers
OpenAI UK Ltd · 🇺🇸 New York City; San Francisco
Sponsorship verdict
No sponsorship evidence yet
No government record and no wording either way. Not a refusal — ask the recruiter.
- No government sponsor record hereThis employer does not appear with approvals in the government data SponsorApply holds.
- The posting doesn’t mention sponsorshipSilence isn’t a refusal — ask the recruiter before investing much time.
- No salary bar for this routeH-1B has no fixed salary bar: the employer must pay at least the prevailing wage for the role and area. Cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level. Source: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/29/2025-23853/weighted-selection-process-for-registrants-and-petitioners-seeking-to-file-cap-subject-h-1b, rules effective 2026-02-27.
- Confirmed live todayWhen a source last listed this job as open.
US H-1B: cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level — Level I gets 1 entry, Level IV gets 4 (DHS projected selection odds ≈15% at Level I to ≈61% at Level IV). Universities and non-profit research employers are cap-exempt. The $100,000 fee for new petitions from abroad is currently blocked by a court order (appeal pending).
A verdict summarises public evidence; it is not legal advice and never a guarantee — the employer and the immigration authority decide. Sign in to factor in where you can already work.
Or apply yourself on the official page →
Why not apply?
No register record and no sponsorship wording in the posting. Worth asking the employer before investing significant time.
SponsorApply flags time-wasters so your applications go where they can land. These come from the posting's own wording — read the original listing to confirm. See better-fit alternatives →
Sponsor Radar — OpenAI UK Ltd
This employer does not appear with approvals in the government data SponsorApply holds.
Past sponsorship or register membership never guarantees sponsorship for this vacancy or for you. Full Sponsor Radar for OpenAI UK Ltd →
About the role
About the Team API Frontiers turns OpenAI’s frontier models into production APIs that developers can use to build reliable products and agents. We own the core path connecting models to developers through the Responses API, with a focus on safety, reliability, and speed. Working closely with Research, Safety, Codex, and other API teams, we bring new model capabilities into production and improve them through developer feedback. About the Role We are looking for a backend software engineer to build and operate the services behind the Responses API. You will shape API behavior, bring new capabilities from research into production, and make long-running agent workflows dependable and fast. The work combines distributed systems engineering with product judgment: designing useful developer interfaces, managing staged rollouts, and following production issues through to durable fixes. In this role, you will: - Design, build, and operate APIs and backend services that bring frontier model capabilities to developers. - Partner with Research, Safety, Codex, and API teams to define API behavior and deliver safe, staged launches. - Build API capabilities for agent workflows, including task delegation, context sharing, and parallel execution. - Strengthen long-running request reliability across timeouts, cancellation, streaming, and background execution. - Improve request-processing performance and tail latency through profiling, efficient systems code, and persistent connections. - Turn developer feedback and production failures into better observability, diagnostics, and lasting product improvements. Your background might look something like: - 5+ years of experience building and operating backend services or developer-facing APIs in production. - Strong software engineering fundamentals, with 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, with a track record of translating complex capabilities into clear, dependable APIs. - Experience taking ownership of ambiguous technical problems, from defining an approach through shipping and improving the result. - Clear communication and effective collaboration across engineering, research, product, and safety disciplines. - Experience with Rust, streaming protocols or WebSockets, or long-running workflow systems is a plus. 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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. 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,