Principal Security Engineer, Infrastructure Security

📋 Description

• • OpenAI is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join the Infrastructure Security (InfraSec) team, a critical group responsible for safeguarding the core of the company's research and production environments. This role is pivotal in protecting the advanced GPU supercomputing clusters, multi-cloud infrastructure, datacenters, networking, storage, and the essential services that power OpenAI's frontier AI models. The InfraSec team's mandate is broad, encompassing everything from the foundational layers of bare-metal hardware and firmware to sophisticated Kubernetes clusters, service meshes, and the intricate data pathways that handle highly sensitive model weights and user data. As a Principal Software Engineer on this team, you will be instrumental in setting the technical direction and driving the execution of vital foundational security services. These services include, but are not limited to, authentication systems, egress/ingress proxies, access brokers, and key management platforms. The systems you will architect and build must adhere to the highest standards of reliability, scalability, and software craftsmanship, forming the very security backbone of OpenAI’s customer and supercomputing environment. They must be robust enough to withstand intense scale and persistent adversarial pressure, ensuring the integrity and security of OpenAI's cutting-edge AI development and deployment.
• • In this impactful role, your day-to-day responsibilities will be multifaceted and demanding, requiring a blend of strategic thinking and hands-on execution. You will be tasked with owning the complete lifecycle of one or more core security services. This ownership extends from the initial architectural design and roadmap development through to the final rollout and ongoing long-term operation. This includes services such as authentication and authorization (authN/Z), policy enforcement mechanisms, secure proxy solutions, and sophisticated key management platforms. A significant part of your work will involve designing and implementing security systems engineered for planet-scale operation. These systems must provide robust security guarantees across a complex technological stack, including hardware, operating systems, Kubernetes environments, intricate networks, and CI/CD pipelines. The challenge lies in meticulously balancing critical factors such as security, reliability, latency, and developer ergonomics to ensure seamless integration and operation. Furthermore, you will lead critical cross-functional launches, collaborating closely with infrastructure and research engineering teams. This leadership involves shaping essential interfaces, developing comprehensive migration plans, and devising safe, phased rollout strategies across vast fleets of systems and vital workflows. You will also be responsible for building or evolving fundamental security primitives. These primitives, such as identity management, attestation capabilities, authorization frameworks, encryption key lifecycle management, and access mediation systems, will serve as foundational platform building blocks for the entire organization. A forward-thinking aspect of this role involves leveraging OpenAI's frontier models and agents to develop advanced automation and detection tooling. This tooling will be crucial for continuously identifying and mitigating risks within OpenAI's large-scale cloud and on-premise environments. Finally, you will actively participate in and lead design reviews and threat modeling sessions for major initiatives, driving the resolution of systemic security issues and continuously improving the security posture.
• • The Security team at OpenAI is built on the principle that security is fundamental to the company's mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. This team is dedicated to protecting OpenAI’s cutting-edge technology, its people, and its innovative products. Their approach is characterized by being highly technical in their development efforts while maintaining an operational rigor in their execution. They provide essential support to every product and research effort across the company. Key tenets guiding the team's work include prioritizing initiatives based on their potential impact, enabling the groundbreaking work of researchers and developers, proactively preparing for the emergence of future transformative technologies, and fostering a strong, collaborative security culture that permeates the entire organization. Joining this team means becoming part of a group that is at the forefront of securing advanced AI development, contributing directly to the safety and success of OpenAI's ambitious goals.
• • In this role, you will have unparalleled opportunities for professional growth and impact. You will gain deep, hands-on experience in architecting, building, and operating security systems at an unprecedented scale, directly contributing to the security of world-leading AI research and infrastructure. You will have the chance to shape the future of security for AI by developing novel solutions and leveraging frontier AI models for security applications. This position offers the ability to mentor and influence other engineers, raising the overall engineering bar and fostering a culture of security excellence. You will gain exposure to a wide range of technologies and complex challenges, from bare-metal hardware to sophisticated cloud-native environments and advanced AI models, significantly broadening your technical expertise. Successfully navigating and excelling in this role will position you as a key technical leader in the field of infrastructure security, particularly within the rapidly evolving domain of artificial intelligence.