Software 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 Security Software Engineer to join the Infrastructure Security (InfraSec) team. InfraSec safeguards the core of OpenAI’s research and production environments—GPU supercomputing clusters, multi-cloud infrastructure, datacenters, networking, storage, and the critical services that power our frontier AI models. Our charter spans everything from bare-metal hardware and firmware to Kubernetes clusters, service meshes, and the data pathways that carry highly sensitive model weights and user data.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and implement production-grade security services (e.g., auth services, access brokers, secure proxies, key-management infrastructure) that provide strong guarantees across hardware, operating systems, Kubernetes, networks, and CI/CD.


• Partner with infrastructure and research engineers to embed security into high-performance compute clusters, enabling rapid model training and deployment without compromising protection.


• Develop automation and detection tooling to continuously identify and mitigate risks in large-scale cloud and on-prem environments.


• Drive high-impact initiatives such as line-speed encryption, machine identity, and network isolation, continuously raising the security bar for emerging AI workloads.


• Lead or participate in design reviews and threat models to ensure new systems launch with strong security foundations and operational excellence.

Required Qualifications

• Strong software engineering skills in languages such as Python, Go, Rust, or C/C++, with a track record of shipping and operating high-reliability distributed services.


• Experience building or operating critical security infrastructure (e.g., auth services, service-to-service proxies, certificate or key-management systems).


• Deep understanding of security principles, best practices, and common vulnerabilities.


• Expertise in securing large-scale cloud platforms (e.g., Azure, AWS, GCP), including multi-cloud networks and cloud-agnostic system design.


• Familiarity with container and orchestration security (Kubernetes, service meshes) and modern authentication/authorization standards (OIDC, mTLS, SPIFFE/SPIRE).


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


• A track record of delivering scalable solutions and driving impactful changes across infrastructure in real-world projects.


• 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 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 cap