Staff & Software Engineer, Payments & Billing, Consumer Monetization

The role

You will evolve payments, billing, and subscription capabilities to support OpenAI's product portfolio. You will architect shared services, design lifecycle orchestration, and solve complex engineering problems involving state synchronization and reliability.

What you will do

• Architect and build shared services and APIs for billing, subscription, and payment capabilities.
• Design lifecycle orchestration and state synchronization across internal services and external providers.
• Solve correctness and recovery problems involving asynchronous events and partial failures.
• Improve payment success and resilience through processor integrations and routing.
• Work with risk and integrity teams to incorporate abuse prevention into purchasing flows.
• Build testing, observability, and operational tooling.
• Lead initiatives from problem definition through implementation and rollout.
• Partner with Product, Finance, Operations, and engineering teams.
• Provide technical leadership through hands-on development, design reviews, and mentorship.

Required qualifications

• Demonstrated technical ownership at Staff level or beyond.
• Deep experience designing, building, and operating backend or distributed systems in production.
• Ability to reason 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.
• Strong technical judgment with product and business understanding.
• Ability to bring clarity to ambiguous problems and communicate with technical and non-technical partners.
• Enjoy hands-on engineering and helping other engineers develop judgment.

Nice to have

• Experience in payments, billing, subscriptions, memberships, e-commerce, offers, promotions, or other transactional platforms.
• Exceptional distributed systems experience.

About the company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.