Staff+ Software Engineer, Payments & Billing, Consumer Monetization

Details

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

The team owns both customer-facing experiences and the underlying platforms that power them, partnering with Product, Design, Growth, Data Science, Finance, Operations, and engineering teams across OpenAI.

The role focuses on evolving payments, billing, and subscription capabilities for OpenAI's growing product portfolio. The work involves billing requirements, billing lifecycle management, synchronization across internal systems and external providers, and enabling new products and commercial models. The role is based in San Francisco and requires three days per week in the office.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build shared services and APIs for billing, subscriptions, and payments.
• 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.
• Integrate abuse-prevention controls into purchasing flows in partnership with risk and integrity teams.
• Build testing, observability, and operational tooling to detect, diagnose, and resolve failures.
• 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.

Requirements

• Demonstrated technical ownership at Staff level or beyond, including shaping architecture and delivering substantial initiatives across teams.
• Deep experience designing, building, and operating backend or distributed systems in production.
• Strong understanding of 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.
• Ability to bring clarity to ambiguous problems and communicate effectively with technical and non-technical partners.
• Enjoyment of hands-on engineering and 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. Exceptional distributed systems experience is also relevant.

Benefits

• Base salary range of $266,000–$445,000 per year, plus equity.
• 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, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, paid company holidays, office closures, and sick or safe time.
• Mental health and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily meals in offices and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional benefits may include charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.