Software Engineer, Payments · OpenAI

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 18:23:39 GMT
Engineering

OpenAI · San Francisco · $255K – $440K · hybrid

Location

San Francisco

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

Hybrid

Department

Applied AI

Compensation

$255K – $440K • Offers Equity

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.

Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts

Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)

401(k) retirement plan with employer match

Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)

Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees

13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)

Mental health and wellness support

Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage

Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth

Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible

Relocation support for eligible employees

Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.

This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.

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.