Software Engineer, Monetization Delivery

OpenAI•San Francisco, CA

2d•Onsite

About The Position

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 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 research breakthroughs into real-world systems at global scale. We’re looking for an experienced Software Engineer to help build OpenAI’s ads delivery platform—systems that determine when, where, and how monetized experiences appear across OpenAI products. You will architect and implement large-scale, high-performance delivery and optimization systems with rigorous requirements around latency, correctness, safety, and continual improvement. This is a deeply technical, 0→1 role where you’ll work across systems engineering, backend engineering, and applied ML to create the next generation of AI-native ads delivery pipelines. This role is exclusively based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.

Requirements

Have 10+ years of experience designing and scaling distributed systems with strict correctness, reliability, and latency requirements
Have built or contributed to delivery, ranking, recommendation, ML-inference, or real-time decisioning systems
Are comfortable working across backend, systems engineering, and (optionally) applied ML
Thrive in deeply technical 0→1 problem spaces where architecture, strategy, and implementation must be invented
Have strong intuition for system design tradeoffs and the ability to translate product goals into technical decisions
Communicate clearly, think holistically, and reason about long-term system maintainability and sustainability

Nice To Haves

Experience in ads delivery, ranking systems, marketplaces, or ML-driven optimization platforms

Responsibilities

Architect, build, and optimize the ads delivery platform that serves ads in real time at global scale
Design systems for correctness, safety, and continuous optimization under heavy load
Develop decision engines, ranking logic, and delivery pipelines that require strong performance, reliability, and privacy guarantees
Partner with Product, Design, and Research to define requirements and drive novel solutions to highly complex technical problems
Prototype, experiment, and deploy rapid iterations to improve delivery quality, relevance, and efficiency
Implement infrastructure and services that support ongoing measurement, optimization, and model-based improvements
Ensure operational excellence through monitoring, alerting, performance analysis, and rigorous testing
Contribute to technical strategy and help shape the long-term roadmap of the ads delivery stack
Build safety, fairness, and policy alignment into delivery systems from first principles