Staff & Software Engineer, Payments & Billing, Consumer Monetization
San Francisco · Full-time · Hybrid · Posted Sep 24, 2026
At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time
- Workplace
- Hybrid
- Location
- San Francisco
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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.
- 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.
- To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
- We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241.
About the role
- We are 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.
- You'll help set technical direction while remaining hands-on in implementation and delivery.
Responsibilities
- 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.
Requirements
- 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.
- Ability to reason carefully 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.
- Combination of strong technical judgment 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.
- Enjoy hands-on engineering while helping other engineers develop their judgment and take on broader ownership.
Workplace
- Based in San Francisco
- Three days per week in the office
