Staff+ Software Engineer, Identity Infrastructure Engineering

About the Team

Security is at the foundation of OpenAIs mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Identity Infrastructure Engineering team sits at the core of this effort designing and building the identity and access management solutions that protect our model weights customer data and critical systems across multiple cloud environments. We partner with teams across OpenAIApplied Engineering Research IT and Securityto provide a secure and scalable platform for permissioning orchestration and innovative AI research.

About the Role

Were looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help build and evolve the identity infrastructure that supports OpenAIs research engineering and internal platforms.

This role sits at the intersection of cloud infrastructure identity systems and software engineering. Youll work across production systems infrastructure-as-code cloud control planes identity providers and operational infrastructure to build secure scalable and reliable systems used broadly across the company.

The ideal candidate has experience building and operating large-scale mission-critical systems with strong reliability and security requirements and is comfortable writing production code designing distributed systems and driving ambiguous projects from 0 to 1 while building the operational rigor needed to run critical infrastructure over time.

In this role you will:

• Lead the architecture development and operation of identity infrastructure that spans cloud platforms internal systems and critical engineering services.

• Design and evolve systems for authentication authorization access governance auditability and policy enforcement with a strong focus on reliability scalability and secure-by-default design.

• Build foundational infrastructure and platform capabilities that are broadly used across engineering research and security teams.

• Improve the reliability observability performance and operational maturity of identity infrastructure that supports mission-critical systems and workflows.

• Lead ambiguous high-impact technical initiatives across security infrastructure and engineering teams driving alignment and execution across multiple stakeholders.

• Partner closely with engineers researchers and security teams to build scalable access patterns and infrastructure that enable rapid development while maintaining strong security boundaries and operational rigor.

• Raise the engineering bar through strong technical judgment thoughtful system design operational excellence and long-term ownership of critical infrastructure.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 10 years building and operating large-scale infrastructure platform or backend systems.

• Deep experience with cloud infrastructure identity systems distributed systems and infrastructure-as-code.

• Experience leading complex technical initiatives across teams and driving architecture in ambiguous environments.

• Experience building security-critical systems involving authentication authorization access governance privileged access or policy enforcement.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals with experience in Go Rust Python or similar languages.

• Ability to debug across code cloud infrastructure identity systems networking and operations.

• High bar for reliability security auditability and operational rigor in mission-critical systems.

This role is based in San Francisco CA. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

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 OpenAIs 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 addition job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities and requests can be made via this link.

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Required Experience:

IC