Software Engineer, Monetization Infrastructure (SF/Seattle)

About the Team

The Monetization team is a new cross-functional group working across engineering, product, research, and design to build the foundational systems that will help OpenAI scale access to intelligence responsibly. Our mission is to develop user-first, privacy-preserving monetization products—including next-generation ads experiences—that strengthen user trust, unlock economic opportunity, and support OpenAI’s long-term innovation.

Monetization plays a critical role in enabling OpenAI to continue pushing the boundaries of AI capabilities while ensuring the benefits of AGI are broadly shared. We believe monetization must be aligned with user value, uphold rigorous privacy and safety standards, and sustain a healthy ecosystem of developers and businesses.

This team operates in a greenfield environment and moves quickly through prototyping, experimentation, and iterative deployment. We partner closely with Product, Design, and Research to bring research breakthroughs into real-world systems at global scale.

About the Role

We’re looking for an experienced Software Engineer to help build the core infrastructure behind OpenAI’s monetization and ads systems. In this foundational role, you’ll architect and implement distributed systems that power OpenAI’s monetization stack—focusing on reliability, performance, privacy, and large-scale operation.

You’ll work across backend, systems, and platform layers to define and implement 0→1 infrastructure, partnering closely with Product, Design, and Research to shape the future of monetized AI experiences. Your work will enable both internal and external teams to build on safe, scalable, and robust monetization primitives.

This role is exclusively based across our San Francisco & Seattles sites. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Design and build the foundational backend and infrastructure powering OpenAI’s monetization and ads systems

• Architect large-scale distributed systems that meet strict requirements for reliability, privacy, security, and performance

• Develop APIs, infrastructure services, and internal platforms that support ads creation, delivery, measurement, and optimization

• Work closely with Product, Research, and Design to translate requirements into scalable technical solutions

• Drive 0→1 infra development through rapid prototyping, experimentation, and iterative improvements

• Contribute to the long-term technical strategy and roadmap for the monetization infra stack

• Ensure high engineering rigor through excellent testing, documentation, observability, and operational best practices

• Build for safety, privacy, fairness, and policy alignment from first principles

• Collaborate across engineering orgs to ensure the infra layer is flexible, performant, and resilient
  

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems

• Have experience designing mission-critical systems with demanding reliability, performance, and correctness requirements

• Think in systems—architecture, data flows, operational concerns, observability, and long-term maintainability

• Are comfortable defining technical direction in ambiguous 0→1 environments

• Enjoy working cross-functionally to shape product requirements and system capabilities

• Communicate clearly, reason holistically, and make decisions grounded in user needs and long-term system health

• Bonus: Experience in ads systems, marketplaces, AI/ML infra, or other monetization-intensive domains

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.

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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.