Staff Backend Engineer, Financial Engineering

OpenAI, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking Staff+ backend engineers to design and operate payments, billing, and financial systems that power ChatGPT, Codex, and our API platform across global markets.

You will build product catalogs, SKUs, bundles, workspace management, entitlements, usage metering, and APIs to turn usage into accurate bills. You’ll own reliability and security while collaborating with product, finance, and other engineering teams to ship scalable, auditable systems that customers trust.

Qualifications

• Staff+ engineers with strong backend experience.
• Experience in payments, billing, or financial systems is a strong plus, but not required.
• Experience with product catalogs, packaging and bundles, workspace management, entitlements, or usage metering.
• Experience building financial or transaction systems at scale, checking that records match across systems, or supporting compliance and audits.

Responsibilities

• Design and build systems for purchasing, payments, subscriptions, and billing across OpenAI products and global markets.
• Build product catalogs, SKUs, and bundles that let product teams launch new offerings and evolve how products are packaged.
• Develop workspace and entitlement systems that connect purchases and subscriptions to product access for individuals and teams.
• Keep charges and product access correct when requests are retried, updates arrive late, or another service fails.
• Build metering systems, data pipelines, and APIs that turn large volumes of usage into accurate bills, timely spending information, and records that are easy to trace and verify.
• Create reusable building blocks that let product teams launch new offerings, pricing, and payment options without rebuilding the foundations each time.
• Make complex financial workflows simple for customers and internal teams, using customer feedback and experiments to improve the experience.
• Scale and evolve live systems while protecting customer access, financial accuracy, performance, and security.
• Own problems from early design through launch and operation, working with product, design, finance, and other engineering teams to make and test important technical decisions.

Skills

Backend development

Payments domain

Billing systems

Data pipelines

API design

Security

Job description

About the Team

Financial Engineering (FinEng) builds the financial systems behind ChatGPT, Codex, and OpenAI's API platform. These products serve people, developers, and businesses around the world. We make them easy to buy, use, and pay for. Our systems support everything from individual subscriptions to usage-based billing and complex enterprise agreements.

We also build the foundations for how products are packaged, accessed, and used: product catalogs, SKUs and bundles, workspaces, entitlements, and usage metering. These systems connect what customers purchase to the capabilities they can access and the usage they can manage.

That reach creates challenging engineering problems. We build services and data pipelines that handle large volumes of usage and transactions, keep payments, product access, and financial records consistent across systems, and adapt as products and pricing change. The same foundations must support a simple checkout and the detailed spending controls a large business needs.

Your work will help teams launch new products faster and give customers confidence in what they are paying for. The work spans customer experiences, backend services, and data systems, with opportunities to influence technical design and see your work through to production.

We’re hiring Staff+ engineers with strong backend experience. Experience in payments, billing, or financial systems is a strong plus, but not required.

In this role, you will:

• Design and build systems for purchasing, payments, subscriptions, and billing across OpenAI products and global markets.

• Build product catalogs, SKUs, and bundles that let product teams launch new offerings and evolve how products are packaged.

• Develop workspace and entitlement systems that connect purchases and subscriptions to product access for individuals and teams.

• Keep charges and product access correct when requests are retried, updates arrive late, or another service fails.

• Build metering systems, data pipelines, and APIs that turn large volumes of usage into accurate bills, timely spending information, and records that are easy to trace and verify.

• Create reusable building blocks that let product teams launch new offerings, pricing, and payment options without rebuilding the foundations each time.

• Make complex financial workflows simple for customers and internal teams, using customer feedback and experiments to improve the experience.

• Scale and evolve live systems while protecting customer access, financial accuracy, performance, and security.

• Own problems from early design through launch and operation, working with product, design, finance, and other engineering teams to make and test important technical decisions.

Nice to Have

• Experience with payments, subscriptions, pricing, billing, or other systems that manage customer purchases and revenue.

• Experience with product catalogs, packaging and bundles, workspace management, entitlements, or usage metering.

• Experience building financial or transaction systems at scale, checking that records match across systems, or supporting compliance and audits.

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.

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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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