OpenAI

Software Engineer, Ads Integrity

OpenAI4 days ago
Location

San Francisco

Type

Full Time

Salary

USD 293,000 – 385,000

Level

Senior

Role

Security Engineer

Posted

Jul 21, 2026

Full TimeSenior

The role

Summary

As a Software Engineer in Ads Integrity at OpenAI, you'll design and operate foundational trust and safety systems that keep ads products secure, trustworthy, and resilient to abuse at global scale. Working in a greenfield environment, you'll build detection infrastructure, enforcement workflows, and integrity measurement systems while collaborating across Ads Delivery, ML, Product, Safety, and Policy teams. This role requires 10+ years of distributed systems experience in ads integrity, fraud detection, or related domains, with proven expertise in adversarial systems, real-time detection, and high-stakes operational decision-making.

What you'll do

Design Real-Time and Offline Detection Systems: Architect and implement scalable systems that detect harmful, deceptive, fraudulent, or policy-violating ads, advertisers, creatives, and landing experiences using both real-time processing and batch analysis pipelines.
Develop Risk-Signal Infrastructure: Build scalable risk-signal pipelines, rules and model-serving infrastructure, decision systems, and enforcement workflows that operate across the entire ads lifecycle from creation through delivery.
Build Account Verification and Abuse Prevention: Engineer advertiser-verification, account-risk assessment, abuse-prevention, and fraud-detection capabilities that raise the cost of adversarial behavior and protect ecosystem integrity.
Create Review and Investigation Tools: Develop review and investigation tools that enable operations and policy teams to make fast, consistent, and explainable decisions on suspicious activity and policy violations.
Design Feedback Loops and Measurement Systems: Establish feedback loops, labeling systems, and integrity metrics that improve detection quality, manage false positives, and quantify user impact while maintaining system reliability.
Integrate Integrity into Ad Delivery Stack: Partner with Ads Delivery and Ads ML teams to seamlessly integrate integrity checks into retrieval, ranking, auctions, pacing, and serving without compromising latency or reliability requirements.
Engineer Adversarial-Resilient Systems: Build systems that adapt to evolving adversarial tactics, support safe experimentation with new detection methods, and enable effective incident response during security incidents.
Define Technical Strategy and Roadmap: Own the technical vision and multi-quarter roadmap for ads integrity across OpenAI's monetization stack, setting architectural direction for foundational systems.
Operate Systems with Engineering Rigor: Ensure systems operate with high engineering standards through comprehensive testing, observability instrumentation, auditability logging, privacy and security reviews, and production operational practices.

What we look for

Technical

Distributed Systems ArchitectureDeep expertise in designing scalable, fault-tolerant distributed architectures, including message queues, stream processing, caching layers, and data consistency models.
Real-Time Detection and Decision SystemsProficiency building real-time processing systems for detecting anomalies, fraud, and abuse using low-latency pattern matching, rules engines, and model inference serving.
Machine Learning System IntegrationTechnical understanding of ML model serving, feature engineering, model lifecycle management, and integrating ML predictions into real-time decision systems at production scale.
Data Pipeline ArchitectureExperience designing and maintaining data pipelines for feature extraction, labeling, feedback loops, and metric computation that support both real-time and offline analysis.
Observability and MonitoringExpertise implementing comprehensive observability through structured logging, metrics collection, alerting, and debugging tools to ensure system health and incident response.
Privacy and Security EngineeringStrong understanding of privacy-preserving techniques, data minimization, encryption, secure data handling, and security review processes for handling sensitive user and advertiser data.

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related FieldEducational foundation in computer science, engineering, mathematics, or equivalent practical experience demonstrating strong systems thinking and algorithmic problem-solving.

Experience

10+ Years Distributed Systems DevelopmentExtensive experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems at the infrastructure or platform level, preferably in ads technology, trust and safety, or security domains.
Ads Integrity or Trust and Safety Domain ExpertiseProven track record working in ads integrity, content moderation, anti-abuse systems, fraud prevention, security operations, or adjacent trust and safety domains at scale.
Adversarial Systems ExperienceDemonstrated expertise understanding adversarial systems, threat modeling, and building detection, decisioning, enforcement, verification, or investigation capabilities against sophisticated actors.
Multi-Signal Detection System DevelopmentHands-on experience combining rules, heuristics, machine learning signals, human review, and feedback loops into production-grade systems that balance precision, recall, and operational overhead.
Low-Latency, High-Throughput SystemsProven ability to architect and operate low-latency, high-throughput services or data pipelines meeting demanding requirements for reliability, correctness, privacy, and security.
Cross-Functional Collaboration at ScaleExperience partnering effectively with policy, operations, legal, safety, security, product, and machine learning teams on complex, ambiguous, and sensitive problems requiring executive alignment.

Skills

Required skills

Backend Systems DesignProven expertise designing and implementing backend infrastructure at scale, with strong understanding of scalability, reliability, and operational complexity.
Fraud Detection and PreventionHands-on experience building fraud detection systems, understanding adversarial patterns, and implementing detection logic that balances coverage with false positive management.
Rules Engine and Decision SystemsExperience developing rules engines, scoring systems, and decision frameworks that can be quickly iterated and updated without code deployment.
Ads Technology Stack KnowledgeUnderstanding of ads systems architecture including ad serving, bidding, auctions, targeting, delivery optimization, and the unique requirements of ads infrastructure.
Operational Excellence and Production RigorDemonstrated commitment to operational excellence through extensive testing, monitoring, incident response, and production readiness practices.
API and Service DesignAbility to design clear, maintainable APIs and services that enable other teams to integrate with integrity systems and use detection outputs in their workflows.
Precision-Recall Tradeoff AnalysisStrong analytical skills reasoning about precision, recall, false positives, false negatives, and their downstream business and operational impact.

Nice to have

Policy and Legal Compliance ExperienceBackground working with policy, legal, and regulatory teams to translate business and legal requirements into technical enforcement systems.
ML Model Monitoring and EvaluationExperience monitoring ML model performance in production, debugging model degradation, and designing feedback loops to maintain model quality over time.
Account Risk Assessment SystemsPrior experience building account verification systems, identity verification, and account risk scoring for fraud prevention.
Investigation and Review ToolingExperience building internal tools for investigation, forensics, and case management that support trust and safety operations teams.
Open Source ContributionsActive participation in open-source projects related to security, infrastructure, or distributed systems demonstrates community engagement and technical depth.
Crisis Incident ManagementExperience responding to and remediating large-scale security or abuse incidents, including root cause analysis and prevention system improvements.

Compensation & benefits

Salary

USD 293,000 – 385,000 (annual)

Stock options

Available

Benefits

Relocation Assistance

Comprehensive relocation support provided for new employees relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area headquarters.

Equity and Stock Options

Meaningful equity compensation aligned with company success and long-term value creation.

Comprehensive Health and Wellness Coverage

Medical, dental, and vision insurance with company contributions for employee and dependent coverage.

Retirement Planning

401(k) retirement savings plans with company matching to support long-term financial planning.

Professional Development

Opportunities to work on cutting-edge AI systems, learn from world-class engineers, and contribute to foundational technology.

Collaborative Team Environment

Work alongside leading researchers, engineers, and product professionals in a mission-driven organization.

Interview process

  1. 1
    Initial Screening — Phone screening with recruiter focused on background verification, role expectations, and alignment with OpenAI's mission and values.
  2. 2
    Technical Deep Dive — Comprehensive technical interview with senior engineers covering systems design, distributed systems challenges, ads integrity problem-solving, and approach to building large-scale detection systems.
  3. 3
    System Design Case Study — Detailed discussion of how you would architect an ads integrity system from first principles, including threat modeling, detection strategies, and operational considerations.
  4. 4
    Cross-Functional Collaboration Discussion — Conversation with product, safety, and operations stakeholders about how you approach working across teams on ambiguous, sensitive problems.
  5. 5
    Leadership and Vision Interview — Discussion with hiring manager about technical leadership, strategic thinking, and your vision for building integrity systems at scale.
  6. 6
    Final Review and Offer — Comprehensive candidate review across all interviewers, reference checks, and finalization of compensation package.
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OpenAI

OpenAI

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OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence research organization developing advanced AI models like GPT. Focused on ensuring AI benefits humanity, it creates tools for natural language processing and generative AI applications.

San Francisco, California, United StatesFounded 2015openai.com

Tech Stack

Languages
PythonGoJava or C++SQL
Frameworks
Stream Processing FrameworksRules EnginesML Serving Platforms
Databases
Time-Series DatabasesNoSQL SystemsData WarehousesOperational Databases
Tools
Monitoring and Observability PlatformsIncident Management SystemsVersion Control and CI/CDLogging and Tracing InfrastructureConfiguration Management
Other
Threat Modeling and Security ArchitectureFeedback Loop DesignFairness and Bias AnalysisPrivacy-Preserving Techniques

Interview Guides

5 guides available for OpenAI

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