Staff+ Software Engineer, Payments & Billing, Consumer Monetization

About the Team

Consumer Monetization builds the experiences and systems that power how customers purchase and pay for OpenAI products. Our scope spans purchasing flows payments subscriptions and billing along with the shared capabilities that support new products offers and distribution channels.

We own both customer-facing experiences and the underlying platforms that power them. We partner closely with Product Design Growth Data Science and engineering teams across OpenAI to make purchasing effective and reliable and new offerings easier to launch and monetize.

About the Role

Were looking for experienced Staff engineers to evolve the payments billing and subscription capabilities that support OpenAIs growing product portfolio.

Youll tackle problems where correctness reliability and flexibility are essential: supporting new billing requirements managing the billing lifecycle synchronizing state across internal systems and external providers and enabling new products and commercial models.

Your work may span several areas based on your expertise and team priorities:

• Billing and monetization capabilities: Extend billing capabilities and improve integrations and state consistency across systems to support new products and business models.

• Subscriptions: Orchestrate purchases renewals plan changes cancellations and recovery ensuring customers are charged correctly and receive the right benefits.

• Payments: Expand payment capabilities through processor integrations routing and broader payment-method coverage.

• Risk and integrity: Partner with risk and integrity teams to integrate controls into purchasing flows reducing abuse while protecting legitimate customer experiences.

Youll help set technical direction while remaining hands-on in implementation and delivery. This is an opportunity to solve complex engineering problems at scale connect architecture decisions to customer and business outcomes and help other engineers take on broader ownership.

This role is based in San Francisco with three days per week in the office.

In this role you will:

• Architect and build shared services and APIs that make billing subscription and payment capabilities easier to adopt and extend across products.

• Design lifecycle orchestration and state synchronization across internal services billing vendors payment processors and app stores.

• Solve correctness and recovery problems involving asynchronous events partial failures retries and reconciliation.

• Improve payment success and resilience through processor integrations routing and recovery strategies.

• Work with risk and integrity teams to incorporate abuse prevention into purchasing flows while maintaining a reliable customer experience.

• Build testing observability and operational tooling that make failures easier to detect diagnose and resolve.

• Lead initiatives from problem definition and technical design through implementation rollout and ongoing operation.

• Partner with Product Finance Operations and engineering teams to balance immediate launch needs with long-term platform investments.

• Provide technical leadership through hands-on development design reviews and mentorship.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have demonstrated technical ownership at Staff level or beyond shaping architecture and delivering substantial initiatives across teams.

• Have deep experience designing building and operating backend or distributed systems in production.

• Reason carefully about data modeling state transitions idempotency consistency concurrency and failure recovery.

• Have built systems where correctness and reliability are critical including integrations with external providers and complex dependencies.

• Combine strong technical judgment with product and business understanding making pragmatic decisions as requirements evolve.

• Bring clarity to ambiguous problems and communicate effectively with technical and non-technical partners.

• Enjoy hands-on engineering while helping other engineers develop their judgment and take on broader ownership.

Experience in payments billing subscriptions memberships e-commerce offers promotions or other transactional platforms is particularly valuable. We also welcome engineers with exceptional distributed systems experience who are motivated to develop expertise in these domains.

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 OpenAIs 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 addition job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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Required Experience:

IC