Software Engineer, Shop/Feed Ads

Applied AI Engineering - San Francisco

About the team

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The Monetization team is a new cross-functional group spanning engineering, product, research, and design. We are building the foundational systems that will help OpenAI scale access to intelligence responsibly.

Our mission is to create user-first, privacy-preserving monetization products—including next-generation ads experiences—that strengthen trust, expand economic opportunity, and support OpenAI’s long-term innovation. We believe monetization should deliver clear user value, uphold rigorous privacy and safety standards, and sustain a healthy ecosystem for developers and businesses.

The team operates in a greenfield environment, moving quickly through prototyping, experimentation, and iterative deployment. We partner closely across Product, Design, and Research to bring new capabilities into real-world systems at global scale.

About the role

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We’re looking for an experienced Software Engineer to lead the design and development of the systems that turn advertiser feeds (eg. retail feeds, travel feeds etc.) into relevant, reliably delivered ads. In this foundational role, you will build across the full ads lifecycle—from ingesting and organizing retailer or travel catalogs into efficient retrieval systems, supporting ranking models, and serving ads at scale.

This role is well suited to an engineer with direct experience in product ads retrieval, ranking, and delivery, along with a strong understanding of merchant feeds and shopping systems such as Google Shopping, YouTube product ads, or Amazon.

We also welcome engineers with Senior Staff-level or greater scope who have deep ownership of large-scale catalogs, search and indexing, ads serving, or closely related distributed systems.

You will independently own complex systemsation with useful ads experiences in ChatGPT.

This role is based in San Francisco and Mountain View. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will

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• Design and build pipelines that ingestation accurate and available for serving.
• Develop scalable catalog storage and indexing systems that make large inventories searchable and reflect changes in product availability, pricing, and attributes.
• Build search and retrieval systems that efficiently identify relevant, eligible products across merchant catalogs.
• Partner with Ads ML to connect product retrieval with ranking models through dependable interfaces, features, and serving infrastructure.
• Engineer low-latency, high-throughput ads delivery systems with strong reliability and correctness guarantees.
• Design real-time event pipelines and distributed storage that support catalog freshness, serving decisions, and downstream feedback.
• Build observability and quality controls to detect feed errors, stale inventory, indexing delays, and serving issues.
• Define technical direction and drive complex projects from early prototypes through production deployment and operation.
• Operate systems with high engineering rigor through testing, monitoring, privacy and security reviews, and strong operational practices.

You might thrive in this role if you

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• Have extensive experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, with direct ownership of product ads retrieval, ranking infrastructure, or delivery.
• Understand merchant feeds and shopping systemsance.
• Have built systems for shopping or product ads at platforms such as Google Shopping, YouTube, Amazon, or a comparable environment.
• Alternativelys, ads serving, or related backend systems.
• Have built low-latency, high-throughput services and data pipelines with demanding reliability and correctness requirements.
• Can reason across ingestion, storage, indexing, retrieval, ranking, and serving, and make thoughtful tradeoffs between freshness, relevance, latency, and cost.
• Are comfortable partnering with machine-learning teams to bring ranking models and signals into dependable production systems.
• Can define technical direction in an ambiguous 0 1 environment and independently drive complex work across teams.
• Communicate clearly and make technical decisions grounded in user value, merchant experience, and long-term system health.

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 the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employeration, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable lawation technology systems and related data security obligations.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

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.

Compensation

$347K – $445K + Offers Equity

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factorsance-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.