Software Engineer, Identity Infrastructure

IT - San Francisco, New York City, and Seattle

About the Team

The Identity Infrastructure Engineering team builds the identity and access systems that OpenAI’s researchers, engineers, and internal teams rely on to protect critical systems and data.

We partner with Research, Applied Engineering, Infrastructure, IT, and Security to make secure access practical across cloud and internal environments.

About the Role

We’re looking for a hands-on software engineer to design and build high-scale, high-throughput secure access proxies and the distributed systems behind them. These are tier-zero services: researchers, engineers, and agents depend on them to reach critical infrastructure safely and reliably.

You’ll work at the intersection of networking; the role also includes credential brokers, policy enforcement, and developer-facing integrations.

You’ll own the services you build from design and implementation through production. That means understanding human, agent, and workload traffic, improving throughput and tail latency, making authorization decisions auditable, and designing for safe multi-region rollout and recovery.

We’re looking for someone who can turn a demanding security requirement into software that works well at scale and is straightforward for other engineers to use.

In this role, you will:

• Design and implement secure access proxies, gateways, and credential brokers that provide narrowly scoped, auditable access to infrastructure and internal services while reducing standing privileges..
• Integrate identity and access policy across clients, proxies, and target systems so approved permissions take effect promptly and access expires or is revoked when required. Ensure correct behavior when policy is stale or sessions remain active.
• Build observability that explains the end-to-end access path: latency, errors, saturation, authorization decisions, and identity attribution, without leaking credentials.
• Engineer safe multi-region rollouts, canaries, rollback, failover, and recovery. Validate changes with realistic test environments, load tests, and failure testing.
• Keep core access services reliableant, and maintainable. Own production support, maintenance, upgrades, and incident recovery; ship durable fixes that reduce recurring failures, alert noise, and manual work.
• Make secure access easy to adopt through reusable APIs, client tooling, diagnostics, and self-service workflows. Lead migrations that preserve critical workflows, with tested rollback and recovery paths and clear ownership across Infrastructure, Security, and SRE.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have built and operated production backend, proxy, networking, or infrastructure services with demanding scale or availability requirements.
• Have practical networking depth and can reason about HTTP, TCP, TLS, DNS, routing, and load balancing across real request paths.
• Can explain how you handled performance bottlenecks, partial failures, multi-region deployment, or a difficult production change in a system you personally built.
• Understand authentication, authorization, least privilege, trust boundaries, credential handling, and the consequences of an access-control failure.
• Have strong software engineering fundamentals and experience with Go, Rust, Python, or similar languages.
• Use testsance, and recovery.
• Make practical scope decisions experience is helpful; strong engineering and production ownership matter more than knowing every tool.

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

$230K – $325K + 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.