Software Engineer, Monetization Delivery

Details

The Monetization team is a cross-functional group working across engineering, product, research, and design to build foundational systems that help OpenAI scale access to intelligence responsibly. The team's mission is to develop user-first, privacy-preserving monetization products (including next-generation ads experiences) that strengthen user trust, unlock economic opportunity, and support OpenAI's long-term innovation.

This is a deeply technical 0→1 role focused on building OpenAI's ads delivery platform — systems that determine when, where, and how monetized experiences appear across OpenAI products. You will architect and implement large-scale, high-performance delivery and optimization systems with rigorous requirements around latency, correctness, safety, and continual improvement. The role is exclusively based in OpenAI's San Francisco HQ. Relocation assistance is offered to new employees.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and optimize the ads delivery platform that serves ads in real time at global scale.
• Design systems for correctness, safety, and continuous optimization under heavy load.
• Develop decision engines, ranking logic, and delivery pipelines requiring strong performance, reliability, and privacy guarantees.
• Partner with Product, Design, and Research to define requirements and drive novel solutions to highly complex technical problems.
• Prototype, experiment, and deploy rapid iterations to improve delivery quality, relevance, and efficiency.
• Implement infrastructure and services that support ongoing measurement, optimization, and model-based improvements.
• Ensure operational excellence through monitoring, alerting, performance analysis, and rigorous testing.
• Contribute to technical strategy and help shape the long-term roadmap of the ads delivery stack.
• Build safety, fairness, and policy alignment into delivery systems from first principles.

Requirements

• Extensive experience designing and scaling distributed systems with strict correctness, reliability, and latency requirements (posting specifies 10+ years).
• Experience building or contributing to delivery, ranking, recommendation, ML-inference, or real-time decisioning systems.
• Comfortable working across backend, systems engineering, and (optionally) applied ML.
• Ability to operate in deeply technical 0→1 problem spaces where architecture, strategy, and implementation must be invented.
• Strong intuition for system design tradeoffs and ability to translate product goals into technical decisions.
• Clear communication, holistic thinking, and reasoning about long-term system maintainability and sustainability.
• Bonus: experience in ads delivery, ranking systems, marketplaces, or ML-driven optimization platforms.

Benefits

• Base salary range shown: $255,000 – $405,000 (total compensation may include equity and performance-related bonuses for eligible employees).
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental leave and medical/caregiver leave.
• Flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees.
• 13+ paid company holidays and additional company office closures.
• Mental health and wellness support; employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend; daily meals in offices and meal delivery credits as eligible.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company emphasizes safety and human needs in AI development and is an equal opportunity employer. Background checks are administered consistent with applicable law. Reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities are available.