Full Stack Software Engineer, Monetization Platform
Full Stack Engineer · Senior · Full Time
Opens OpenAI's application page
Role
What you'll do.
OpenAI seeks an experienced Staff+ or Senior Full Stack Software Engineer to build the Monetization Platform—a foundational system for pricing, packaging, and access control across OpenAI's product suite. This role combines full-stack product intuition with strong backend and systems engineering depth, requiring expertise in distributed systems, data model consistency, and building reusable platform capabilities that enable teams to launch new commercial offerings with minimal custom engineering. You'll partner across Product, Design, Finance, and Data Science to architect integrations with billing systems, design intuitive customer experiences, and establish technical direction for a new high-impact team shaping how AI becomes more accessible and valuable to users worldwide.
Responsibilities
- Architect Pricing and Packaging Platform: Define and build foundational shared capabilities for plan configuration, eligibility determination, entitlement integrations, and usage allowances that serve as the backbone for all monetization offerings across OpenAI's product suite.
- Design End-to-End User Experiences: Create intuitive, polished plan selection and usage experiences across the entire stack, connecting responsive frontend interfaces to product APIs and backend services while ensuring clarity and trust for customers.
- Prototype and Validate Commercial Ideas: Collaborate with Product, Finance, and Data Science teams to rapidly turn new pricing and packaging ideas into working prototypes and experiments, then analyze results to guide iterative improvements and inform business strategy.
- Build Billing System Integrations: Design and implement integrations with Financial Engineering systems that preserve correct access and subscription state through complex lifecycle transitions including plan changes, customer migrations, asynchronous updates, and graceful failure handling.
- Develop Reusable Platform Components: Build configuration tools, admin interfaces, and shared components that enable product teams to launch new offerings and pricing models with minimal custom engineering, reducing dependencies and accelerating time-to-market.
- Ensure Production Quality and Reliability: Take ownership of reliability across the monetization platform through comprehensive migration planning, phased rollout strategies, rigorous testing, detailed monitoring and observability, and documented recovery procedures for revenue-critical systems.
- Shape Technical Direction and Roadmap: Establish architectural vision for the nascent Monetization Platform team, make principled tradeoffs between immediate product launches and long-term platform investments, and develop engineering team capabilities through thorough code and design reviews.
- Drive Consistency and Correctness: Reason rigorously about data model design, lifecycle state transitions, consistency guarantees, concurrency patterns, and failure scenarios to ensure the platform reliably handles the complexity of subscription management and usage-based access control.
Qualifications
What we look for.
Technical
Distributed Systems Design
Comprehensive understanding of building resilient systems across multiple services with emphasis on eventual consistency, idempotency, retry mechanisms, and handling of concurrent state mutations in pricing and billing contexts.
Transactional Correctness
Deep expertise in ensuring data consistency through asynchronous updates, plan migrations, subscription changes, and partial failure scenarios with understanding of compensating transactions and state reconciliation.
API-Driven Architecture
Experience designing and implementing well-versioned, documented APIs that abstract complex pricing and entitlement logic for consumption by multiple product teams with clear contracts and backward compatibility.
Performance Optimization
Ability to identify bottlenecks in usage tracking, eligibility checks, and entitlement determination; optimize database queries, caching strategies, and computational efficiency for revenue-critical operations.
Security and Compliance
Understanding of securing customer billing data, implementing proper access controls, managing secrets, and ensuring compliance with financial and data protection regulations affecting monetization systems.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related Field
Foundation in computer science, engineering, or equivalent practical experience demonstrating strong problem-solving and systems thinking capabilities applicable to complex architectural challenges.
Experience
Senior/Staff+ Level Experience
Minimum 8-10 years of software engineering experience with demonstrated track record of setting architectural direction, leading significant cross-team projects, and maintaining hands-on coding contributions at senior levels.
Full-Stack Product Development
Proven experience taking loosely-defined product or business problems from discovery through implementation to production operation, with evidence of combining technical depth with customer empathy and product intuition.
Scaling Complex Systems
Demonstrated ability to architect and operate systems handling significant scale, complexity, and correctness requirements, with experience implementing rigorous migration strategies and production-grade reliability practices.
Cross-Functional Leadership
Track record of effectively collaborating with Product Managers, Designers, Data Scientists, and Finance teams, translating between technical and business contexts, and elevating teammate capabilities through mentorship.
Skills
Required
Full-Stack Development
Proficiency building complete systems from user-facing interfaces to backend services, with the ability to optimize across the entire stack and understand API design, frontend-backend integration, and system performance tradeoffs.
Backend Systems and Architecture
Deep expertise in designing scalable backend systems, microservices architecture, and distributed systems patterns with experience in handling complex state management, consistency guarantees, and failure modes.
Data Model Design and Consistency
Strong ability to reason about data models, schema design, ACID properties, transaction semantics, concurrency control, and data consistency across distributed systems, particularly with stateful operations and partial failure scenarios.
Production Systems Engineering
Demonstrated expertise in production reliability including migration planning, staged rollout strategies, comprehensive testing frameworks, monitoring and observability, incident response, and graceful degradation patterns.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Proven ability to work effectively across multiple disciplines including Product Management, Design, Finance, and Data Science; translating business requirements into technical solutions and communicating architectural decisions clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
API Design and Integration
Experience designing and integrating APIs that connect frontend experiences to backend services, with emphasis on clear contracts, versioning strategies, and seamless third-party integrations including billing and payment systems.
Preferred
Pricing and Subscription Systems
Nice to haveExperience building or contributing to pricing platforms, subscription management systems, entitlements engines, usage-based billing, or similar commerce infrastructure that manages complex customer lifecycle transitions.
Monetization Platform Experience
Nice to haveBackground developing growth platforms, payment processing systems, or commerce experiences that directly impact revenue, user acquisition, and customer lifetime value metrics.
Usage Tracking and Analytics
Nice to haveExperience implementing robust usage tracking, metering systems, quota enforcement, and analytics pipelines that accurately measure feature utilization and customer consumption patterns.
Financial Systems Integration
Nice to haveBackground integrating with financial systems, billing platforms, accounting systems, or payment gateways with understanding of reconciliation, audit trails, and financial controls.
Configuration and Admin Tooling
Nice to haveExperience building configuration systems, admin interfaces, or internal tools that enable product teams to self-serve and reduce engineering dependencies for launching new offerings or features.
TypeScript/JavaScript and React
Nice to haveProficiency with modern JavaScript ecosystems for building polished, responsive user interfaces and full-stack development with type safety and excellent developer experience.
Tech stack
Languages
Frameworks
Databases
Tools
Other
Compensation
Pay and benefits.
Base·USD 266,000 – 445,000
Equity·Stock options
Benefits
Equity (Stock Options)
Significant equity stake in OpenAI as a Staff+ or Senior engineer, allowing you to participate in the long-term value creation of the organization as AI capabilities and adoption expand.
Comprehensive Health Coverage
Medical, dental, and vision insurance plans covering employees and their families with OpenAI contributing substantially to premiums and out-of-pocket costs for quality healthcare.
Retirement Planning
401(k) retirement savings plan with company matching contributions, enabling long-term financial security and tax-advantaged retirement savings.
Flexible Time Off
Generous paid time off policy and flexible work arrangements supporting work-life balance, mental health, and the ability to recharge during intense periods of development.
Professional Development
Budget and time for conferences, training, courses, and technical certifications supporting continuous learning and staying current with rapidly evolving infrastructure and platform technologies.
Parental Leave
Comprehensive parental leave policy providing paid time off for the birth or adoption of children, supporting family building and retention of experienced talent.
Mental Health and Wellness
Access to mental health counseling services, wellness programs, gym subsidies, and other benefits supporting employee wellbeing in a high-stakes, fast-paced AI research environment.
Commuter Benefits
Pre-tax commuter benefits for public transportation, parking, and vanpool services in the San Francisco Bay Area, reducing commuting costs and supporting environmental sustainability.
Full posting
Original listing.
About the Team
As AI becomes capable of doing more useful work, the way people access and pay for it needs to evolve. Monetization Platform is a new team within Growth building the systems and experiences that make that possible across the entire suite of OpenAI products. Our mission is to make powerful AI easier to access, its value easier to understand, and new ways of using it easier to bring to market.
We work where product experience, platform architecture, and business strategy meet. A new plan or pricing model can change what customers can accomplish—and requires careful engineering across eligibility, entitlements, usage, and subscriptions. We turn that complexity into capabilities that product teams can build on and experiences that customers can trust.
Working with Product, Design, Finance, Financial Engineering, and Data Science, we’re shaping a platform that can evolve alongside our models and products. This is an opportunity to help define a new team’s technical direction and build systems that expand what OpenAI can offer.
About the Role
We’re looking for experienced Staff+ and Senior engineers who combine full-stack product instincts with strong backend and systems depth. You’ll help decide what to build, establish the architecture, and carry ideas through to working products—from a customer’s first interaction with a plan to the services that determine what they can access and use.
The work spans new pricing and packaging capabilities, plan and usage experiences, and the shared UIs and tools that make launches repeatable. You’ll partner closely with Financial Engineering to connect these capabilities to subscription and billing systems, keeping customer access and state consistent as offerings evolve.
You’ll have substantial ownership over technical decisions and delivery in an area where the roadmap is still taking shape. Your impact will show up in the experiences you ship, the engineering work you eliminate from future launches, and the opportunities your systems make possible.
In this role, you will:
Define and build shared pricing and packaging capabilities, including plan configuration, eligibility, entitlement integrations, and usage allowances.
Create intuitive plan and usage experiences across the stack, connecting polished interfaces to product APIs and backend services.
Turn new commercial ideas into working prototypes and experiments with Product, Finance, and Data Science, then use what you learn to guide the next iteration.
Design integrations with Financial Engineering that preserve correct access and subscription state through plan changes, migrations, asynchronous updates, and partial failures.
Build reusable components and configuration tools that let teams launch offerings with less custom engineering and fewer dependencies.
Take responsibility for production quality through migration planning, staged rollouts, testing, monitoring, and recovery paths.
Shape the technical roadmap, make clear tradeoffs between immediate launches and shared foundations, and develop other engineers through code and design reviews.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have set architectural direction and delivered significant projects involving multiple teams, while remaining an active contributor to the code.
Bring depth in backend or distributed systems and can work across the APIs and interfaces that turn those systems into useful products.
Reason rigorously about data models, lifecycle transitions, consistency, concurrency, and what happens when an operation fails or runs twice.
Have taken loosely defined customer or business problems through discovery, implementation, and production operation.
Combine product intuition with experimentation and analysis, and care about whether customers understand and benefit from what you build.
Enjoy establishing new capabilities: choosing an initial design, shipping something useful, and improving it as the problem becomes clearer.
Build alignment across disciplines, explain technical choices clearly, and help teammates take on greater responsibility.
Experience with pricing, subscriptions, entitlements, usage-based products, billing integrations, or growth platforms would be especially valuable. We also welcome engineers whose experience building demanding product or platform systems prepares them to learn this domain.
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.
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. 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.
OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy
At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
Redirects to OpenAI's application page.
Other roles
More at OpenAI.
Engineering Manager, Guardian
Manager
Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) - AI Infra - SF
Senior
Software Engineer, Physical Engineering
Senior
Principal Software Engineer, ChatGPT Education and Learning
Principal
Software Engineer, Backend — Dots
Mid