Principal Security Engineer, Infrastructure Security

OpenAI

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Research Services 👥 201 employees 📍 San Francisco, CA, US Est. 2015

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with…

Job Overview

OpenAI is seeking a Principal Security Engineer to join our Infrastructure Security (InfraSec) team. InfraSec protects the foundations of OpenAI’s research and production environments, spanning GPU supercomputing clusters, multi-cloud infrastructure, datacenters, networking, storage, and the critical services that power our frontier AI models. Our charter includes securing everything from bare-metal hardware and firmware, to Kubernetes clusters and service meshes, to data storage and access pathways for highly sensitive model weights and user data.

Key Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end security outcomes for one or more critical infrastructure areas, including multi-quarter strategy, roadmap, and delivery.


• Design and build security controls across diverse layers (e.g., physical hardware, firmware/BMC, OS, Kubernetes, networks, and CI/CD) to defend against sophisticated adversaries and insider threats.


• Lead cross-functional programs to deploy security enhancements and control changes across broad-scale infrastructure, balancing security guarantees with reliability and velocity.


• Take a generalist approach to building security controls, balancing a mix of security expertise and broad technical skillsets to adapt to evolving challenges.


• Lead and/or drive threat modeling and design reviews for major infrastructure changes, ensuring strong security foundations and operational excellence.


• Mentor and level up engineers across InfraSec and partner teams, contributing to a strong security culture through guidance, reviews, and technical leadership.

Required Qualifications

• Deep understanding of security principles, best practices, and common vulnerabilities, including strong security judgment under ambiguity


• A proactive mindset, with the ability to identify and address security gaps or inefficiencies through automation and tooling.


• Expertise and curiosity about using frontier models and agents to effectively solve security challenges.


• A track record of leading large, cross-org initiatives from concept to rollout, including navigating tradeoffs, driving alignment, and delivering measurable risk reduction.


• Deep expertise in the security of cloud platforms (e.g., Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure), especially securing multi-cloud networks and infrastructure, and designing cloud-agnostic systems.


• Experience securing on-prem deployments and datacenters from construction to multi-tenant use.


• Familiarity with container security, orchestration security, and authentication/authorization.


• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with an ability to think critically and objectively assess security risks.


• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to convey complex security concepts to executive, technical, and non-technical stakeholders.


• Excitement about collaborating with cross-functional teams to build secure, reliable systems that scale globally.

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