Software Engineer, Monetization AI/ML (SF/Seattle)

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 experienced Software Engineers to help build OpenAI’s foundational ads ranking and recommendation systems—the ML and AI platforms that determine how monetized experiences are selected, ordered, and optimized across OpenAI products.

In this role, you’ll architect and implement large-scale, high-performance ML-driven systems with rigorous requirements around latency, correctness, safety, privacy, and continuous improvement. You’ll work on modern, transformer- and LLM-inspired architectures that move beyond traditional feature engineering toward more expressive, context-aware decisioning. Your work will have a direct revenue impact and make ChatGPT and other products accessible to more people with fewer usage limits or without having to pay.

This is a deeply technical, 0→1 founding-stage role where you’ll operate across backend engineering, systems design, and applied AI/ML to help define the next generation of AI-native monetization and recommendation platforms.

This role is exclusively based across our San Francisco and Seattle sites. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Architect, build, and evolve large-scale ads ranking and recommendation systems using modern ML and AI techniques

• Design and productionize LLM- and transformer-inspired models that leverage sequential signals, long-horizon context, and sparse or delayed feedback.

• Develop model-driven decision logic and inference pipelines that operate under real-world constraints around performance, reliability, and privacy.

• Partner closely with Product, Design, and Research to define requirements and translate ambiguous product goals into scalable ML systems.

• Prototype, experiment, and rapidly iterate on new model architectures and training approaches to improve relevance, quality, and efficiency.

• Build services and infrastructure that support training, evaluation, online inference, and continuous optimization of ML models.

• Establish strong measurement, experimentation, and debugging practices to understand model behavior and system-level outcomes.

• Contribute to technical strategy and help shape the long-term evolution of OpenAI’s monetization and recommendation stack.

• Embed safety, fairness, and policy considerations directly into model design and system architecture from first principles.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 6+ years of experience building and scaling ML-powered systems in production environments.

• Have worked on ranking, recommendation, ads, marketplaces, or large-scale ML inference systems.

• Are comfortable operating across the full stack — from model development to backend services and production deployment.

• Enjoy deeply technical 0→1 problem spaces where architecture, strategy, and implementation are still being invented.

• Have strong intuition for ML and system design tradeoffs, and can reason about long-term scalability and maintainability.

• Communicate clearly, collaborate effectively across disciplines, and think holistically about system behavior.

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 Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

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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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.