Engineering Manager, Identity & Access Platform

OpenAI•San Francisco, CA

1d•$293,000 - $490,000

About The Position

OpenAI is seeking an engineering leader to head the Identity Infrastructure Engineering team. This team is responsible for designing and building the identity and access management solutions that protect OpenAI's core assets, including model weights, customer data, and critical systems across multiple cloud environments. The role involves leading engineers in developing control planes, policy systems, authorization patterns, infrastructure-as-code, and operational foundations. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in leading teams that manage large-scale, mission-critical infrastructure, with the ability to influence technical direction, grow teams, make architectural decisions, and transform ambiguous problems into robust platforms. This position is central to cloud infrastructure, identity, software engineering, and security-critical operations.

Requirements

10+ years building and developing engineering teams that own large scale platforms.
Experience owning security critical production systems where reliability, least privilege, auditability, and operational rigor are essential.
Deep judgment across cloud infrastructure, IAM, authentication, authorization, workload identity, privileged access, and policy enforcement.
Hands-on technical depth to go into code and architecture, pressure-test designs, and guide tradeoffs across correctness, performance, scale, and operability.
Track record turning complex infrastructure problems into adopted platforms across Engineering, Security, Research, and internal teams.
High bar for engineering quality, operational discipline, and long-term ownership.

Responsibilities

Build and lead a high-performing Identity Infrastructure team, setting technical direction while empowering team ownership.
Define the strategy for the identity platform as the policy plane for access across people, agents, workloads, services, clouds, and internal systems.
Scale Access Manager for evolving human and agent lifecycles, automating routine access and making sensitive access contextual, time-bound, and accountable.
Build the access graph and resource catalog to make access decisions explainable, risk-aware, and grounded in ownership, sensitivity, environment, and usage.
Replace broad standing privilege with risk-tiered access to ensure fast routine work, narrow and observable privileged access, and exceptional break-glass procedures.
Establish first-class authorization for agents and workloads with delegated, action-scoped permissions, time-bound access, full attribution, and no credential sharing.
Partner across Security, Infrastructure, Applied, Research, IT, and product teams to ensure identity standards are adopted.
Operate identity infrastructure as a mission-critical platform with clear reliability goals, safe rollouts, strong observability, healthy on-call rotations, and rigorous incident learning.
Measure success by improvements in safer, faster, and more accountable access, including reduced unnecessary privilege, stronger governance, broader coverage, clearer auditability, and less friction for legitimate work.