Staff & Software Engineer, Payments & Billing, Consumer Monetization

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 are looking for experienced Staff+ engineers to evolve the payments, billing, and subscription capabilities that support OpenAI's growing product portfolio. This role is based in San Francisco, with three days per week in the office.

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; Reasoning 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; 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; Enjoyment of hands-on engineering while helping other engineers develop their judgment and take on broader ownership

Nice to have

Experience in payments, billing, subscriptions, memberships, e-commerce, offers, promotions, or other transactional platforms; Exceptional distributed systems experience and motivation to develop expertise in payments and billing domains