Senior Staff Software Engineer, Identity Infrastructure Engineering

About the Team

Security is at the foundation of OpenAI’s 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 OpenAI—Applied Engineering, Research, IT, and Security—to provide a secure and scalable platform for permissioning, orchestration, and innovative AI research.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Staff+ Software Engineer to help build and evolve the identity infrastructure that supports OpenAI’s research, engineering, and internal platforms.

This role sits at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, identity systems, and software engineering. You’ll 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 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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