--- title: 'Software Engineer, Monetization Data Systems at OpenAI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-monetization-data-systems-openai-mountain-view-mgskbs7mr3ny' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-17' --- # Software Engineer, Monetization Data Systems at OpenAI - **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai) - **Location:** Mountain View, CA - **Compensation:** $293k–$385k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-08-04 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-17 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/d2aad13c-6ed0-4905-ae12-8ea2397b190c ## Job description ## About the Team The Monetization Data Systems team builds the trusted data and product systems that power how the company develops, measures, and improves monetization products. We bring together product usage, pricing, billing, ads, payments, and financial data to help Product, Engineering, Finance, and GTM teams make better decisions and deliver reliable customer experiences. We work at the intersection of data engineering, product engineering, platform engineering, Finance, and GTM. Our goal is to turn complex monetization and financial data into accurate, explainable, and timely data products while building systems that scale with the growth and complexity of the business. ## About the Role We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to design and build the next generation of our monetization data platform. You will own high-impact platform systems end to end, from architecture and implementation through testing, deployment, observability, and ongoing operation. This is a hands-on role for an engineer who enjoys solving ambiguous customer and business problems, designing durable systems, and partnering closely with Product, Data, Finance, Accounting, and GTM. You will help define technical direction, raise the engineering bar, and turn monetization opportunities into reliable, scalable product experiences and platform capabilities. In this role, you will: - Design, improve, and operate reliable, scalable backend services that power pricing, billing, ads, payments, entitlements, and other monetization platform capabilities. - Own the architecture and implementation of critical workflows relevant to monetization data, data contracts, and integrations across product and business systems. - Establish strong guarantees for correctness, availability, security, performance, reconciliation, and auditability across business-critical systems. - Build reusable platform capabilities and developer tools that enable product teams to launch, measure, and iterate on monetization products quickly and safely. - Partner with Product, Design, Data, Finance, Accounting, and GTM teams to translate customer and business needs into robust technical solutions. - Lead the technical design and delivery of complex, cross-functional projects, using clear system designs and RFCs to align partners before implementation and making sound tradeoffs among product velocity, scalability, reliability, and maintainability. - Improve the observability and operational excellence of critical services, including monitoring, incident response, root-cause analysis, capacity planning, and long-term remediation. - Mentor other engineers, contribute to architecture and code reviews, write clear documentation, and share knowledge across teams to elevate the broader engineering organization. You might thrive in this role if you: - Possess a minimum of 7+ years of professional software engineering experience with deep experience building and operating production software systems, backend services, or distributed systems at scale. - Are highly proficient in at least one general-purpose programming language such as Go, Java, Python, Rust, or C++, with strong computer science fundamentals. - Have strong fundamentals in API design, data modeling, storage systems, distributed systems, and event-driven architecture. - Have designed systems with rigorous correctness, reliability, observability, security, privacy, or access-control requirements. - Can collaborate with cross-functional partners to identify needs, navigate ambiguity, and drive progress from problem definition through delivery. - Bring a product-oriented mindset and communicate clearly with technical and non-technical partners, translating customer and business problems into simple, scalable system designs. - Care deeply about correctness and operational reliability while maintaining a practical bias toward delivering customer and business value. - Bring a strong sense of engineering excellence, using clear thinking, sound judgment, and a design-before-implementation approach to create maintainable systems. - Command strong sense of engineering excellence, contribute to a design-before-implementation approach with clear documentation, and knowledge sharing across teams to elevate the broader engineering organization. Nice to have: - Experience with monetization, pricing, billing, ads, payments, entitlements, subscriptions, or other financial products. - Familiarity with financial correctness, reconciliation, compliance, or audit requirements. - Experience with high-scale distributed systems, transactional workflows, event streaming, or payment infrastructure. - Experience building internal platforms, shared frameworks, APIs, or developer tooling used by other engineering teams. - Monetization or finance domain experience is helpful but not required. We value strong software engineering judgment, systems thinking, and the ability to learn a complex domain quickly. ## 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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