# Staff+ Software Engineer, Payments & Billing, Consumer Monetization
**Company:** [OpenAI](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/openai)
Staff Engineer on Consumer Monetization team building the critical payments, billing, and subscription systems that power OpenAI's growing product portfolio. You'll architect distributed systems handling complex billing orchestration, state synchronization across payment processors and external providers, and subscription lifecycle management at scale. This role requires deep backend systems expertise with proven technical leadership in designing reliable, correct systems where failure recovery and financial correctness are paramount.
**Role:** Staff Engineer
**Seniority:** Staff
**Locations:** San Francisco
**Salary:** 266000–445000 USD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/b3fcdad3-abcb-4612-8fd9-a69e17210f0f)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/openai/staff-software-engineer-payments-billing-consumer-monetization
---
## Responsibilities

- Architect Distributed Billing and Payment Systems: Design and build shared microservices and REST/gRPC APIs that abstract complex billing, subscription, and payment logic, making these capabilities easier for product teams across OpenAI to adopt, integrate, and extend. Create service boundaries and contracts that balance shared platform investments with individual product requirements.
- Solve Lifecycle Orchestration and State Synchronization: Engineer resilient systems that coordinate purchases, renewals, plan changes, cancellations, and recovery across multiple independent systems including internal services, billing vendors, payment processors (Stripe, PayPal, etc.), and app store providers. Implement event-driven architectures that guarantee correct state transitions despite network delays, processor failures, and partial outages.
- Handle Correctness and Financial Reconciliation: Design sophisticated failure recovery mechanisms for asynchronous billing events, including idempotent operations, deduplication, retry strategies, and reconciliation processes. Ensure customers are charged exactly once, receive correct benefits, and that financial discrepancies are detected and resolved quickly through automated reconciliation workflows.
- Optimize Payment Success and Resilience: Expand payment processor integrations across multiple providers with intelligent routing, fallback strategies, and adaptive retry mechanisms. Implement payment recovery flows, handle complex decline scenarios, and measure success metrics to continuously improve payment authorization rates and reduce revenue leakage from failed transactions.
- Integrate Risk and Abuse Prevention Controls: Partner with Risk and Security teams to embed fraud detection, abuse prevention, and account protection mechanisms into purchasing flows. Balance security requirements with customer experience, implementing rate limiting, validation rules, and anomaly detection that catch malicious activity without blocking legitimate customers.
- Build Operational Excellence Infrastructure: Develop comprehensive testing frameworks including property-based testing for state transitions, chaos engineering for distributed failure scenarios, and comprehensive observability systems. Create dashboards, alerts, runbooks, and diagnostic tools that enable on-call engineers to quickly detect issues, understand root causes, and execute remediation steps.
- Lead End-to-End Technical Initiatives: Own technical projects from discovery through production operation, defining problems with Product and Finance teams, creating detailed technical designs, leading implementation across multiple engineers, managing staged rollouts, and maintaining systems in production. Own success metrics and business outcomes, not just technical metrics.
- Provide Technical Leadership and Mentorship: Conduct design reviews that raise engineering standards, mentor junior and mid-level engineers on distributed systems concepts, code quality, and ownership. Model pragmatic technical decision-making that weighs correctness, performance, maintainability, and delivery timelines against business requirements and customer needs.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with Product Management to understand monetization strategies, with Finance on accounting and reconciliation requirements, with Operations on vendor management and incident response, and with Growth teams on new product launch timelines. Translate business requirements into technical architectures and manage tradeoffs when requirements conflict.

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Computer Science or Related Field","description":"Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, or related field preferred. Equivalent professional experience building production software systems for 8+ years can substitute for formal degree requirements at Staff level."}

### technical

- {"name":"Distributed Systems Architecture","description":"Expert-level design and implementation experience with distributed backend systems in production, including service-oriented architecture (SOA), microservices patterns, asynchronous message processing, and event-driven systems. Demonstrated ability to architect systems that are correctness-focused, operationally resilient, and maintainable at scale."}
- {"name":"Data Modeling and State Management","description":"Deep expertise in data modeling for transactional systems, including relational database schema design, state machines, idempotency patterns, and consistency models (ACID, eventual consistency tradeoffs). Experience designing systems where data correctness is non-negotiable and designing for failure recovery."}
- {"name":"Production Backend Systems","description":"Proven track record building, deploying, and operating production backend systems at scale. Experience with system reliability, performance optimization, debugging production issues, and observability. Comfortable working with complex dependencies, external integrations, and third-party provider APIs."}
- {"name":"Asynchronous Processing and Resilience","description":"Strong experience designing resilient systems handling asynchronous events, partial failures, timeouts, retries, idempotency, and reconciliation. Understanding of eventual consistency, compensation patterns, saga orchestration, and distributed transaction coordination across multiple systems."}
- {"name":"Payment and Financial Systems Experience","description":"Preferred but not required: experience building payments, billing, subscriptions, e-commerce platforms, or other mission-critical transactional systems. If not from fintech background, demonstrated ability to rapidly learn domain-specific requirements around financial accuracy, auditability, and compliance."}

### experience

- {"name":"Staff-Level Technical Leadership","description":"Demonstrated ownership at Staff level or equivalent, with evidence of shaping system architecture, defining technical direction, and delivering substantial cross-team initiatives. Experience influencing technical strategy beyond your immediate team and helping other engineers grow in technical judgment."}
- {"name":"Complex System Design and Delivery","description":"Track record of successfully designing, building, and shipping complex systems involving multiple teams, external integrations, and significant technical challenges. Evidence of managing ambiguity, making pragmatic tradeoffs, and delivering systems that balance immediate product needs with long-term platform investments."}
- {"name":"Third-Party Integration Experience","description":"Experience integrating with external platforms and APIs (payment processors, vendors, etc.), handling rate limits, failures, API versioning, and maintaining compatibility. Understanding of building robust integrations that isolate internal systems from external provider reliability."}
- {"name":"Product and Business Acumen","description":"Ability to translate business requirements and product strategy into technical architecture decisions. Experience working cross-functionally with non-technical stakeholders (Product, Finance, Operations) and making technical decisions informed by customer and business context."}

## Skills

### required

- {"name":"Backend Software Engineering","description":"Strong ability to design, implement, and maintain production backend systems using modern programming languages, databases, and distributed systems principles. Comfortable with code quality standards, testing practices, and operational concerns."}
- {"name":"Distributed Systems Fundamentals","description":"Deep understanding of consistency models, CAP theorem, eventual consistency, distributed consensus, asynchronous messaging, and failure modes. Ability to reason about correctness and performance tradeoffs in distributed architectures."}
- {"name":"Database Design and Optimization","description":"Expertise with relational databases (SQL) including schema design, indexing, query optimization, and transaction management. Experience with sharding, replication, and handling scale. Familiarity with both SQL and NoSQL approaches for different problem domains."}
- {"name":"API Design and Integrations","description":"Experience designing clean, maintainable APIs (REST, gRPC) and integrating with third-party services. Understanding of API versioning, backward compatibility, error handling, and building resilient integrations."}
- {"name":"System Observability and Debugging","description":"Proficiency with monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting systems. Ability to set up comprehensive observability to detect issues early, diagnose root causes in production, and build runbooks for incident response."}
- {"name":"Technical Communication","description":"Ability to clearly communicate complex technical concepts to engineers, product managers, and business stakeholders. Strong written communication for design documents, architecture decisions, and technical documentation."}

### preferred

- {"name":"Payment Systems and FinTech","description":"Experience building payment processing systems, billing platforms, subscription management, or e-commerce infrastructure. Understanding of payment processor integrations, PCI compliance, reconciliation processes, and financial system requirements."}
- {"name":"Event-Driven Architecture","description":"Experience designing and building systems using event streams, message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ), and event-driven patterns. Understanding of event sourcing, CQRS, and temporal consistency patterns."}
- {"name":"Saga and Orchestration Patterns","description":"Familiarity with saga pattern for distributed transactions, process orchestration, and choreography patterns. Experience implementing resilient workflows across multiple services and managing long-running processes."}
- {"name":"Machine Learning Platform Experience","description":"Experience working on infrastructure or developer tools at AI/ML companies. Understanding of building systems that serve varied stakeholder needs and rapidly evolving product requirements."}
- {"name":"Chaos Engineering and Resilience Testing","description":"Experience intentionally introducing failures to test system resilience, running chaos experiments, and designing systems to gracefully degrade under adverse conditions."}
- {"name":"Mentorship and Technical Leadership","description":"Track record of developing junior and mid-level engineers, conducting effective design reviews, and helping teams raise technical standards. Experience building technical cultures and spreading best practices."}

## Tech stack

### tools

- {"name":"Kubernetes","description":"Container orchestration platform for deploying, scaling, and managing microservices in production."}
- {"name":"Datadog or Similar Observability Platform","description":"Comprehensive monitoring, alerting, logging, and distributed tracing for production system visibility and incident response."}
- {"name":"Git/GitHub","description":"Version control and collaboration platform for code review, CI/CD integration, and team development workflows."}
- {"name":"Stripe, PayPal, or Similar Payment Processor APIs","description":"Third-party payment provider integrations that the system must orchestrate, monitor, and maintain compatibility with."}

### others

- {"name":"SQL and Relational Database Concepts","description":"Core expertise in SQL query optimization, transaction isolation levels, indexing strategies, and relational modeling for correctness-critical systems."}
- {"name":"Asynchronous Processing Patterns","description":"Understanding of message queues, event sourcing, CQRS, idempotency, deduplication, and eventual consistency patterns for building resilient distributed systems."}
- {"name":"Testing and Quality Assurance","description":"Experience with unit testing, integration testing, property-based testing, chaos engineering, and comprehensive test coverage for mission-critical systems."}
- {"name":"Incident Response and Observability","description":"Practical experience with production debugging, creating comprehensive runbooks, building alerts that catch real issues, and postmortem processes."}

### databases

- {"name":"PostgreSQL","description":"Primary relational database for billing state, transactions, accounts, and customer data where ACID compliance and complex queries are essential."}
- {"name":"Redis","description":"In-memory cache and event stream processing for high-frequency operations, rate limiting, and real-time data access patterns in payment flows."}
- {"name":"Kafka or Similar Event Streaming","description":"Distributed message broker for asynchronous billing events, state changes, and integration with external payment processors and internal systems."}

### languages

- {"name":"Python","description":"Primary or secondary backend language for business logic, data processing, and system implementation at scale."}
- {"name":"TypeScript/JavaScript","description":"Used for backend services, APIs, and platform infrastructure components alongside other languages."}
- {"name":"Go or Rust","description":"Potential languages for systems-level concerns, high-performance services, and infrastructure components."}

### frameworks

- {"name":"FastAPI/Django or Node.js/Express","description":"Modern web frameworks for building RESTful APIs, microservices, and backend applications that handle consumer monetization flows."}
- {"name":"gRPC","description":"High-performance RPC framework for inter-service communication and internal APIs within the distributed billing system."}

## Benefits

### benefits

## Compensation

- **max:** 500000
- **min:** 350000
- **currency:** USD
- **stockOptions:** true

## Interview process

### steps

- {"name":"Screening Call","description":"Initial 30-minute conversation with a recruiter to discuss background, experience level, compensation expectations, and alignment with the Staff+ role. This screens for general fit and readiness for technical discussions."}
- {"name":"Technical Phone Interview","description":"90-minute technical interview with an engineer covering distributed systems fundamentals, data modeling, and system design. Expect questions on eventual consistency, idempotency, failure recovery, and designing billing/payment systems. This assesses deep technical reasoning and production experience."}
- {"name":"System Design Interview","description":"120-minute deep-dive into designing a complex distributed system relevant to payments/billing. You'll present architecture decisions, discuss tradeoffs, handle failure scenarios, and justify technical choices. Evaluates Staff-level design thinking and ability to communicate architecture clearly."}
- {"name":"Behavioral and Leadership Interview","description":"60-minute conversation focused on technical leadership, mentorship, cross-functional collaboration, and handling ambiguity. Expect questions about influencing without authority, making pragmatic tradeoffs, and developing other engineers. Assesses cultural fit and Staff+ impact potential."}
- {"name":"Domain Expert Conversation","description":"Optional 60-minute discussion with a payments/billing domain expert if you lack direct fintech experience. Explores your ability to learn domain-specific requirements and your curiosity about complex financial systems. Not always required but valuable for mutual fit assessment."}
- {"name":"Executive Stakeholder Meeting","description":"Brief 30-45 minute conversation with engineering leadership, product leadership, or executive stakeholders. Demonstrates how you'd partner cross-functionally and think about business context. This is typically near the end of the process for Staff+ roles."}

## Full description
**About the Team**

Consumer Monetization builds the experiences and systems that power how customers purchase and pay for OpenAI products. Our scope spans purchasing flows, payments, subscriptions, and billing, along with the shared capabilities that support new products, offers, and distribution channels.

We own both customer-facing experiences and the underlying platforms that power them. We partner closely with Product, Design, Growth, Data Science, and engineering teams across OpenAI to make purchasing effective and reliable, and new offerings easier to launch and monetize.

**About the Role**

We’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.

**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](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf).

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](https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA). 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](https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241).

[OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf)

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.