Software Engineer, HSM Infrastructure Security, Consumer Devices

📋 Job Overview

We are hiring a Security Software Engineer to design and implement the hardware-backed security foundations used across OpenAI’s device ecosystem. A central focus of this role is hardening the boundary between our policy systems and the HSMs that protect sensitive cryptographic keys. This boundary determines which operations may be performed, what may be signed, which policies must be satisfied, and how changes to trusted software and policy are authorized.

🏢 About OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory whose goal is to develop artificial intelligence safely and beneficently. The company is focused on developing and promoting friendly AI, and has developed several products, including GPT-3, DALL-E, and Codex.

🎯 The Role

This is a hands-on software-engineering role. You will be expected to design systems, write and review production code, debug across hardware and software boundaries, and carry projects from initial requirements through deployment. It is not an HSM administration, PKI operations, compliance, or architecture-only position.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement security-critical software and firmware for HSMs, secure elements, trusted execution environments, and hardware roots of trust.
• Build and harden the policy-to-HSM boundary responsible for authorizing certificate issuance and cryptographic signing operations.
• Develop HSM trusted applications, firmware components, host interfaces, device drivers, SDKs, or cryptographic service integrations.
• Implement or extend cryptographic interfaces such as PKCS#11, OpenSSL providers or engines, platform key-storage APIs, or comparable hardware-security interfaces.
• Build firmware and software that cryptographically enforces key generation, provisioning, usage, rotation, recovery, and destruction policies.
• Design and implement HSM-backed certificate authority, code-signing, key-management, and device-identity systems.
• Develop end-to-end cryptographic protocols spanning devices, secure hardware, policy services, and backend infrastructure.
• Build security capabilities supporting device attestation, secure boot, factory provisioning and restoration, user registration, and authentication.
• Design controls that make trusted software and policy changes verifiable, auditable, and subject to appropriate multi-party authorization.
• Write, review, test, and audit secure embedded software for resource-constrained environments.
• Develop test harnesses, emulators, fuzzers, and fault-injection tooling to validate security properties and failure behavior.
• Threat-model hardware and software trust boundaries and translate findings into concrete engineering improvements.
• Partner with hardware, firmware, infrastructure, application, and security teams to integrate secure-by-default capabilities into production systems.
• Help establish engineering standards for HSM development, applied cryptography, secure key management, and certificate infrastructure.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 5+ years experience building secure embedded firmware for constrained environments
• Deep programming experience in C, C++, or Rust.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• A strong track record of designing, implementing, debugging, and shipping production systems software.
• Hands-on experience developing security-critical software or firmware within, or directly adjacent to, an HSM, secure element, TEE, or hardware root of trust.
• Experience developing one or more of the following:
• HSM firmware or trusted applications
• Cryptographic mechanisms or hardware-accelerated cryptographic services
• HSM device drivers, host libraries, SDKs, or middleware
• PKCS#11 providers, mechanisms, or integrations
• Secure key-provisioning or key-injection protocols
• HSM-backed certificate authority or code-signing systems
• Signing-policy enforcement within a hardware-backed trust boundary
• Strong knowledge of applied cryptography, digital signa

🎁 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.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

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.