Software Engineer, Payments

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Hybrid work model

Equal opportunity employer

Job summary

A pioneering technology firm in San Francisco is seeking a Software Engineer to join their Payments Team. This role involves architecting and scaling core payment infrastructure, collaborating with cross-functional teams, and ensuring reliable financial systems. Candidates should have over 5 years of experience in software engineering with a focus on payments or financial systems. This position offers a hybrid work model and the opportunity to contribute to the sustainability of AGI.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional experience in software engineering, ideally focused on payments or financial systems at scale.
• Familiarity with payment processors or internal financial systems.
• Strong product mindset and understanding of product needs.

Responsibilities

• Architect, implement and scale core payment infrastructure.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical systems.
• Improve the reliability and observability of money movement.

Skills

Software engineering

Payment systems

Collaboration

Communication skills

Tools

Stripe

Adyen

Braintree

Job description

About the Team

The Payments Team is working to make AGI financially sustainable by enabling OpenAI to accept payments across our existing products (ChatGPT, ChatGPT for Teams, API) and supporting future commercial experiences. We own the user-facing payments experience, direct integrations with payment service providers, and other supporting infrastructure that powers checkout and payment flows. Payments works closely with teams across Finance, Legal, Growth, Product, external vendors and more to ensure our payments infrastructure scales with the business and supports evolving commercial goals.

About the Role

As a Software Engineer on the Payments Team, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the infrastructure that powers OpenAI’s financial systems. You’ll design and build core payments systems, partner with cross-functional teams to deliver scalable solutions, and ensure that our financial systems support rapid product iteration and global reach. We’re looking for people who are pragmatic, collaborative, and energized by the opportunity to build systems that are foundational to OpenAI’s long-term mission and sustainability.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Architect, implement and scale core payment infrastructure.
• Build robust and extensible financial primitives to enable rapid iteration and support hyper-growth.
• Collaborate closely with internal and external stakeholders (e.g. Finance, GTM, Product, etc) to translate business requirements into clean, scalable technical systems.
• Demonstrate high levels of ownership to get changes shipped in the highly-regulated domain of payments.
• Create a seamless user experience for checkout around the world.
• Improve the reliability, observability and auditability of money movement at OpenAI.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 5+ years of professional experience in software engineering, ideally with a focus on payments or financial systems at scale.
• Are familiar with payment processors (e.g., Stripe, Adyen, Braintree) or have built similar internal financial systems, e.g. storing cardholder data, pricing, online commerce, etc.
• Bring a strong product mindset and a desire to deeply understand product needs and design for long-term flexibility.
• Thrive in high-growth, ambiguous environments, and can balance fast execution with technical rigor and system reliability.
• Excellent communication skills, with ability to build consensus among stakeholders both internally and externally.

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.

OpenAI’s affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement. Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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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