Software Engineer, Identity Infrastructure

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, distributed systems, and infrastructure security, building the serving paths and control-plane integrations that connect identities to resources. Teleport is a core part of the current platform; 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 reliable, performant, 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 tests, profiling, telemetry, and reproducible experiments to debug across system boundaries and verify correctness, performance, and recovery.

• Make practical scope decisions, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and follow through from code to production. Teleport or comparable access-platform 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, 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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