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

We’re looking for experienced Staff+ engineers to evolve the payments, billing, and subscription capabilities that support OpenAI’s growing product portfolio.

You’ll 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.

You’ll 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 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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