--- title: 'Software Engineer, Ad Formats at OpenAI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-ad-formats-openai-san-francisco-e36e4pawjskb' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-24' --- # Software Engineer, Ad Formats at OpenAI - **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai) - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $347k–$445k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-05-26 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-24 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/0b212a4a-6709-4da8-b59d-283a9bbf812e/application **Skills:** Frontend systems, Backend infrastructure, Distributed systems, Creative rendering systems, Ads systems, Platform infrastructure, Ads formats, Content delivery, Design systems, Media platforms, Interactive product experiences > Join the Monetization team to build foundational ad format systems for ChatGPT. You will design, build, and scale creative rendering and presentation layers, ensuring high-quality, privacy-preserving ad experiences across multiple surfaces. ## Job description ## 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, advertisers, 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 new ad experiences into real-world systems across OpenAI surfaces at global scale, including thoughtfully integrating them into the core ChatGPT experience. ## About the Role We’re looking for an experienced Software Engineer to help build the creative rendering and presentation layer of OpenAI’s ads ecosystem. This is a foundational role responsible for defining how ads are structured, rendered, and delivered across different surfaces, platforms, and media types. You’ll work across the full technical stack to build infrastructure and tooling for new ad formats, including text, image, video, native, conversational, and interactive experiences. You will help ensure these formats render reliably, perform efficiently, and feel natural within the core ChatGPT experience. You’ll collaborate deeply with Product, Design, and Research to create ads experiences that are useful, high-quality, privacy-preserving, and aligned with OpenAI’s standards for safety and user trust. In this role, you will: - Design, build, and scale the creative rendering and presentation systems that power OpenAI’s ads experiences. - Develop infrastructure and tooling for ad formats across text, image, video, native, conversational, and interactive surfaces. - Define how ads are structured, rendered, validated, and delivered across ChatGPT and other OpenAI product experiences. - Build systems that ensure ads render reliably, perform efficiently, and meet high quality standards across platforms. - Partner closely with Product, Design, and Research to prototype and ship ad experiences that feel native to the core ChatGPT experience. - Architect distributed systems and services with strong reliability, usability, privacy, and performance guarantees. - Drive 0→1 product development through rapid prototyping, experimentation, and iterative deployment. - Contribute to technical strategy, propose new directions, and help shape the roadmap for OpenAI’s ads formats platform. - Maintain high engineering rigor through strong testing, documentation, observability, and operational best practices. - Uphold the highest levels of safety, privacy, fairness, and policy compliance across all ad rendering and delivery systems. You might thrive in this role if you: - Have 7+ years of experience building high-scale consumer product experiences, creative systems, ads systems, or platform infrastructure. - Have a track record of architecting and delivering complex systems that power user-facing experiences across multiple surfaces. - Care deeply about product quality, performance, reliability, and the details of how experiences render for users. - Are comfortable working at the intersection of frontend systems, backend infrastructure, design, and product strategy. - Bring strong product intuition and enjoy collaborating deeply with Product, Design, and Research. - Thrive in 0→1 environments where systems, architecture, and user experiences must be defined from scratch. - Communicate clearly, think holistically, and make decisions rooted in both user needs and long-term sustainability. - Are motivated by building privacy-preserving, safe, and user-first monetization systems. - Bonus: Have experience with ads formats, creative rendering systems, content delivery, design systems, media platforms, or interactive product experiences. Location This role is exclusively based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees. ## 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. ## About OpenAI ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. - **Entity Type**: Private – structured as a nonprofit parent (OpenAI Foundation) governing a for-profit public benefit corporation (OpenAI Group). The company has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, signaling a potential future IPO. - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA - **Founded**: 2015 - **Founders**: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and others ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence research and deployment - **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises via API and platform), B2C (ChatGPT users), and developers (API, open-source models) - **Mission**: To ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity. ## Products & Services - **[ChatGPT](https://openai.com/chatgpt)**: Conversational AI assistant available via web and mobile, used by consumers and integrated into enterprise workflows. - **[GPT-4 API](https://openai.com/product)**: Large language model accessed via API for developers to build AI-powered applications (text generation, summarization, code assistance, etc.). - **[DALL-E](https://openai.com/dall-e-3)**: Image generation model that creates images from natural language descriptions. - **[Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper)**: Open-source speech recognition system. - **[OpenAI Agents](https://openai.com/)**: Emerging product category focused on autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks on behalf of users (announced June 2026). ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed in the provided sources. Widely reported in the press at ~$300 billion as of early 2026 (post-funding round), but this figure is not confirmed by OpenAI’s official materials. - **Key Metric**: Total funding exceeds $13 billion from Microsoft and other investors. The company has also confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC (see [openai.com](https://openai.com/) – “Confidential submission of draft S-1”). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Microsoft (strategic partner and largest investor), with additional participation from Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others. - **Growth Signals**: Active hiring with 721 open roles posted; expansion into agent-based products; confidential IPO filing; continued deployment of frontier models. ## Competitive Advantages - **First-mover & brand recognition**: ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, establishing OpenAI as the household name in generative AI. - **Research leadership**: Consistently publishes cutting-edge research (GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Whisper, etc.) and attracts top AI talent. - **Compute & infrastructure**: Exclusive partnership with Microsoft provides massive cloud computing resources (Azure) for training and inference. - **Unique governance structure**: The nonprofit parent ensures mission alignment (AGI benefiting humanity) while the for-profit arm can raise capital and scale products. ## Strategic Focus - **Safe AGI development**: Continued emphasis on safety research, alignment, and responsible deployment (e.g., safety systems, model provenance). - **Enterprise expansion**: Growing ChatGPT Enterprise and API offerings for businesses. - **Agentic AI**: Building autonomous agents that can “transform work” (announced June 2026). - **IPO preparation**: Confidential S-1 filing indicates intent to go public, which will require increased financial transparency and governance maturity. ## Why Work Here - **Culture & values**: OpenAI’s stated values include “Humanity first,” “Act with humility,” “Feel the AGI,” and “Ship joy.” Operating principles emphasize agency, creativity, rapid iteration, and intense focus. - **Benefits**: Competitive health insurance, mental healthcare support, 24-week paid birth-parent leave (plus 20 weeks for other parents), generous PTO, annual learning & development stipend, daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), and a domestic conference budget. - **Work environment**: Hybrid/office-based (San Francisco headquarters). The company offers a residency program for researchers and engineers transitioning into AI. - **Impact**: Employees work directly on frontier AI models that shape the industry and society. The mission-driven nature attracts talent passionate about AGI’s societal implications. ## Sources 1. [OpenAI About Page](https://openai.com/about/) 2. [OpenAI Careers Page](https://openai.com/careers/) 3. [OpenAI Job Search](https://openai.com/careers/search) 4. 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