About the RoleWe're 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.
Your work may span several areas based on your expertise and team priorities:
- Billing and monetization capabilities: Extend billing capabilities and improve integrations and state consistency across systems to support new products and business models.
- Subscriptions: Orchestrate purchases, renewals, plan changes, cancellations, and recovery, ensuring customers are charged correctly and receive the right benefits.
- Payments: Expand payment capabilities through processor integrations, routing, and broader payment-method coverage.
- Risk and integrity: Partner with risk and integrity teams to integrate controls into purchasing flows, reducing abuse while protecting legitimate customer experiences.
You'll help set technical direction while remaining hands-on in implementation and delivery. This is an opportunity to solve complex engineering problems at scale, connect architecture decisions to customer and business outcomes, and help other engineers take on broader ownership.
This role is based in San Francisco, with three days per week in the office.
In this role, you will:- 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.
You might thrive in this role if you:- Have demonstrated technical ownership at Staff level or beyond, shaping architecture and delivering substantial initiatives across teams.
- Have deep experience designing, building, and operating backend or distributed systems in production.
- Reason carefully about data modeling, state transitions, idempotency, consistency, concurrency, and failure recovery.
- Have built systems where correctness and reliability are critical, including integrations with external providers and complex dependencies.
- Combine strong technical judgment with product and business understanding, making pragmatic decisions as requirements evolve.
- 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.
Experience in payments, billing, subscriptions, memberships, e-commerce, offers, promotions, or other transactional platforms is particularly valuable. We also welcome engineers with exceptional distributed systems experience who are motivated to develop expertise in these domains.
