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OpenAI's Consumer Monetization team is seeking a Staff+ Software Engineer to evolve the payments, billing, and subscription capabilities that power customer purchases across OpenAI's growing product portfolio.
The team owns both customer-facing purchasing experiences and the underlying platform systems. You'll work closely with Product, Design, Growth, Data Science, and engineering teams to ensure purchasing is effective, reliable, and enables new products and commercial models to launch quickly.
Key responsibilities include:
- 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 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'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.
The role is based in San Francisco with three days per week in the office.
Qualifications:
- Demonstrated technical ownership at Staff level or beyond, shaping architecture and delivering substantial initiatives across teams.
- Deep experience designing, building, and operating backend or distributed systems in production.
- Strong reasoning about data modeling, state transitions, idempotency, consistency, concurrency, and failure recovery.
- Experience building systems where correctness and reliability are critical, including integrations with external providers and complex dependencies.
- Strong technical judgment combined with product and business understanding, making pragmatic decisions as requirements evolve.
- Ability to bring clarity to ambiguous problems and communicate effectively with technical and non-technical partners.
- Comfort with 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. Engineers with exceptional distributed systems experience motivated to develop expertise in these domains are also welcome.
