--- title: 'Software Engineer, Shop/Feed Ads at OpenAI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-shop-feed-ads-openai-san-francisco-k4d8bkam11km' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-05' --- # Software Engineer, Shop/Feed Ads at OpenAI - **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai) - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $347k–$445k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-10-06 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-05 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/4d7145cf-ef4e-4a39-b1ef-b58e4e5c06d2 ## Job description ## About the team The Monetization team is a new cross-functional group spanning engineering, product, research, and design. We are building the foundational systems that will help OpenAI scale access to intelligence responsibly. Our mission is to create user-first, privacy-preserving monetization products—including next-generation ads experiences—that strengthen trust, expand economic opportunity, and support OpenAI’s long-term innovation. We believe monetization should deliver clear user value, uphold rigorous privacy and safety standards, and sustain a healthy ecosystem for developers and businesses. The team operates in a greenfield environment, moving quickly through prototyping, experimentation, and iterative deployment. We partner closely across Product, Design, and Research to bring new capabilities into real-world systems at global scale. ## About the role We’re looking for an experienced Software Engineer to lead the design and development of the systems that turn advertiser feeds (eg. retail feeds, travel feeds etc.) into relevant, reliably delivered ads. In this foundational role, you will build across the full ads lifecycle—from ingesting and organizing retailer or travel catalogs into efficient retrieval systems, supporting ranking models, and serving ads at scale. This role is well suited to an engineer with direct experience in product ads retrieval, ranking, and delivery, along with a strong understanding of merchant feeds and shopping systems such as Google Shopping, YouTube product ads, or Amazon. We also welcome engineers with Senior Staff-level or greater scope who have deep ownership of large-scale catalogs, search and indexing, ads serving, or closely related distributed systems. You will independently own complex systems, make sound technical tradeoffs, and help define the architecture and roadmap for Shopping/Travel/Feed Ads. You will collaborate closely with Ads ML, Ads Delivery, Product, Design, and Research to connect accurate, fresh advertiser feed information with useful ads experiences in ChatGPT. This role is based in San Francisco and Mountain View. We offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will - Design and build pipelines that ingest, validate, normalize, and refresh merchant product feeds, keeping catalog information accurate and available for serving. - Develop scalable catalog storage and indexing systems that make large inventories searchable and reflect changes in product availability, pricing, and attributes. - Build search and retrieval systems that efficiently identify relevant, eligible products across merchant catalogs. - Partner with Ads ML to connect product retrieval with ranking models through dependable interfaces, features, and serving infrastructure. - Engineer low-latency, high-throughput ads delivery systems with strong reliability and correctness guarantees. - Design real-time event pipelines and distributed storage that support catalog freshness, serving decisions, and downstream feedback. - Build observability and quality controls to detect feed errors, stale inventory, indexing delays, and serving issues. - Define technical direction and drive complex projects from early prototypes through production deployment and operation. - Operate systems with high engineering rigor through testing, monitoring, privacy and security reviews, and strong operational practices. You might thrive in this role if you - Have extensive experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, with direct ownership of product ads retrieval, ranking infrastructure, or delivery. - Understand merchant feeds and shopping systems, including how catalog quality, product availability, and freshness affect relevance and ads performance. - Have built systems for shopping or product ads at platforms such as Google Shopping, YouTube, Amazon, or a comparable environment. - Alternatively, have operated at Senior Staff-level scope or above, leading the architecture and delivery of large-scale catalogs, search and indexing platforms, ads serving, or related backend systems. - Have built low-latency, high-throughput services and data pipelines with demanding reliability and correctness requirements. - Can reason across ingestion, storage, indexing, retrieval, ranking, and serving, and make thoughtful tradeoffs between freshness, relevance, latency, and cost. - Are comfortable partnering with machine-learning teams to bring ranking models and signals into dependable production systems. - Can define technical direction in an ambiguous 0→1 environment and independently drive complex work across teams. - Communicate clearly and make technical decisions grounded in user value, merchant experience, and long-term system health. ## 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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