Software Engineer, Ad Formats

OpenAI; California (MO); On-site; USD 230,000 - 385,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking an experienced Software Engineer to build the creative rendering and presentation layer of OpenAI’s ads ecosystem. This foundational role defines how ads are structured, rendered, and delivered across surfaces 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.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience building high-scale consumer product experiences, ads systems, or platform infrastructure.
• Experience architecting complex systems powering user-facing experiences across multiple surfaces.
• Strong focus on product quality, performance, and rendering details.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

Ads systems

Distributed systems

Frontend & backend

Privacy-preserving

Cross-functional collaboration

Prototype development

Tools

Design systems

Content delivery

Media platforms

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.

Compensation Range: $230K - 385K USD

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 Affiproduct?

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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