Staff+ Software Engineer, Identity Infrastructure Engineering

OpenAI, Inc.

Job Overview

Location

San Francisco

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• Lead the architecture, development, and operation of identity infrastructure spanning cloud platforms, internal systems, and critical engineering services at OpenAI.
• Design and evolve authentication, authorization, access governance, auditability, and policy enforcement systems with a strong focus on reliability, scalability, and secure-by-default design.
• Build foundational platform capabilities used broadly across engineering, research, and security teams to enable secure and scalable AI research and development.
• Improve the reliability, observability, performance, and operational maturity of identity infrastructure supporting mission-critical systems and workflows.
• Drive ambiguous, high-impact technical initiatives across security, infrastructure, and engineering teams, ensuring alignment and execution with cross-functional stakeholders.
• Partner closely with engineers, researchers, and security teams to design scalable access patterns and infrastructure that maintain strong security boundaries while enabling rapid development.
• Raise the engineering bar through technical judgment, thoughtful system design, operational excellence, and long-term ownership of critical identity infrastructure.
• Work across production systems, infrastructure-as-code, cloud control planes, identity providers, and operational infrastructure to deliver secure, scalable, and reliable systems.
• Operate in multi-cloud environments to protect model weights, customer data, and critical systems with rigorous security standards.
• Debug across code, cloud infrastructure, identity systems, networking, and operations to resolve complex, high-stakes issues in production environments.
• Champion operational rigor, auditability, and security in all aspects of identity infrastructure design and deployment.
• Contribute to the evolution of access control systems that support OpenAI’s research, applied engineering, IT, and security functions.
• Own the end-to-end lifecycle of identity systems, from initial design through deployment, monitoring, incident response, and iterative improvement.
• Collaborate with teams to implement secure-by-default patterns that reduce risk while preserving developer velocity.
• Translate high-level security and compliance requirements into concrete technical implementations for identity and access management.
• Maintain and enhance infrastructure-as-code pipelines to ensure consistency, repeatability, and auditability across environments.
• Serve as a technical leader and mentor to engineers working on identity and infrastructure systems.
• Ensure all identity infrastructure meets OpenAI’s standards for reliability, security, and operational excellence in support of its mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity.

🎯 Requirements

• 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

🏖️ Benefits

• Hybrid work model with three days in the office per week in San Francisco, CA
• Relocation assistance for new employees
• Opportunity to work on mission-critical infrastructure supporting OpenAI’s goal to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity
• Collaborative environment partnering with engineering, research, and security teams across the organization

Skills & Technologies

Python

Rust

DevOps

Senior

Hybrid

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OpenAI, Inc.

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About OpenAI, Inc.

OpenAI is a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research and deployment company founded in 2015. It develops large-scale AI models such as GPT, DALL-E, and Codex, providing cloud APIs and consumer applications like ChatGPT. Originally established as a non-profit, it later created a capped-profit subsidiary to attract capital while maintaining its mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

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