Software Engineer (Identity Infrastructure)

Location: Hybrid in San Francisco, New York City, or Seattle, United States. Relocation support is available for eligible employees.

Salary: $230,000–$325,000 base pay annually, plus equity, eligible performance bonuses, and benefits.

Company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company developing and deploying general-purpose artificial intelligence.

What you will do

• Design and implement secure access proxies, gateways, and credential brokers for narrowly scoped, auditable access to infrastructure and internal services.
• Integrate identity and access policies across clients, proxies, and target systems, including permission expiry, revocation, stale policies, and active sessions.
• Build observability for latency, errors, saturation, authorization decisions, and identity attribution without exposing credentials.
• Engineer multi-region rollouts, canaries, rollback, failover, recovery, load testing, realistic test environments, and failure testing.
• Own production support, maintenance, upgrades, incident recovery, performance, reliability, and durable fixes for recurring failures and alert noise.
• Develop reusable APIs, client tooling, diagnostics, self-service workflows, and migrations with tested rollback and recovery paths.

Requirements

• Experience building and operating production backend, proxy, networking, or infrastructure services with demanding scale or availability requirements.
• Practical knowledge of HTTP, TCP, TLS, DNS, routing, and load balancing across real request paths.
• Experience handling performance bottlenecks, partial failures, multi-region deployments, or difficult production changes in personally built systems.
• Understanding of authentication, authorization, least privilege, trust boundaries, credential handling, and access-control failure consequences.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience with Go, Rust, Python, or similar languages.
• Experience using tests, profiling, telemetry, and reproducible experiments to debug system boundaries and verify correctness, performance, and recovery.
• Ability to make practical scope decisions, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and follow work from code through production.

Nice to have

• Experience with Teleport or a comparable access platform.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaboration with Research, Applied Engineering, Infrastructure, IT, Security, and SRE.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match, FSA options, paid parental and medical leave, paid time off, holidays, sick or safe time, and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage, annual learning and development stipend, office meals, meal delivery credits, and relocation support for eligible employees.
• Equity and eligible performance-related bonuses are included in total compensation.

Hiring process

• Additional benefit details are provided during the hiring process.
• Background checks apply in accordance with applicable law for US-based candidates.