Software Engineer, Identity Infrastructure

OpenAI is hiring a software engineer for its Identity Infrastructure Engineering team in San Francisco. The team builds the identity and access systems that researchers, engineers, and internal teams use to protect critical systems and data. This role is for someone who can take a demanding security requirement and turn it into software that works at scale and is easy for other engineers to adopt.

What you will do

• Design and build secure access proxies, gateways, and credential brokers that give 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, including correct behavior when policy is stale or sessions stay 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, and validate changes with realistic test environments, load tests, and failure testing.
• Own production support, maintenance, upgrades, and incident recovery, shipping 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.

What they are looking for

• Experience building and operating production backend, proxy, networking, or infrastructure services with demanding scale or availability requirements.
• Practical networking depth: the ability to reason about HTTP, TCP, TLS, DNS, routing, and load balancing across real request paths.
• Ability to explain how you handled performance bottlenecks, partial failures, multi-region deployment, or a difficult production change in a system you personally built.
• Understanding of authentication, authorization, least privilege, trust boundaries, credential handling, and the consequences of an access-control failure.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience with Go, Rust, Python, or similar languages.
• A habit of using tests, profiling, telemetry, and reproducible experiments to debug across system boundaries and verify correctness, performance, and recovery.
• Practical scope decisions, clear communication about tradeoffs, and follow-through from code to production.

Teleport or comparable access-platform experience is helpful. The posting says strong engineering and production ownership matter more than knowing every tool. Teleport is a core part of the current platform.

Pay and location

The role is based in San Francisco. The salary range is $230K to $325K, and the offer includes equity.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The posting states that AI must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and that the company values the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other legally protected characteristics.

Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered 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. The posting notes that for unincorporated Los Angeles County workers, criminal history may have a direct, adverse relationship with certain job duties, which could result in withdrawal of a conditional offer. Reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities can be requested through the link in the original posting.