Software Engineer, Identity Infrastructure

OpenAI • San Francisco, CA

1d • $230,000 - $325,000

About The Position

The Identity Infrastructure Engineering team builds identity and access systems used by OpenAI researchers, engineers, and internal teams to protect critical systems and data. The team partners with Research, Applied Engineering, Infrastructure, IT, and Security to make secure access practical across cloud and internal environments.

The role is for a hands-on software engineer who will design and build high-scale, high-throughput secure access proxies and the distributed systems behind them. These tier-zero services enable researchers, engineers, and agents to reach critical infrastructure safely and reliably. The work spans networking, distributed systems, and infrastructure security, including serving paths and control-plane integrations that connect identities to resources. Teleport is a core part of the current platform, alongside credential brokers, policy enforcement, and developer-facing integrations.

The engineer owns services from design and implementation through production. The work includes understanding human, agent, and workload traffic; improving throughput and tail latency; making authorization decisions auditable; and designing safe multi-region rollout and recovery. The goal is to translate demanding security requirements into software that works at scale and is straightforward for other engineers to use.

Requirements

• Experience building and operating production backend, proxy, networking, or infrastructure services with demanding scale or availability requirements.
• Practical networking knowledge, including HTTP, TCP, TLS, DNS, routing, and load balancing across real request paths.
• Ability to explain how performance bottlenecks, partial failures, multi-region deployment, or difficult production changes were handled in a system personally built.
• Understanding of authentication, authorization, least privilege, trust boundaries, credential handling, and the consequences of access-control failures.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience with Go, Rust, Python, or similar languages.
• Use of tests, profiling, telemetry, and reproducible experiments to debug across system boundaries and verify correctness, performance, and recovery.
• Ability to make practical scope decisions, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and follow through from code to production.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Teleport or a comparable access platform.

Responsibilities

• 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 for end-to-end access paths, including latency, errors, saturation, authorization decisions, and identity attribution, without exposing credentials.
• Engineer safe multi-region rollouts, canaries, rollback, failover, and recovery; validate changes using realistic test environments, load tests, and failure testing.
• Keep core access services reliable, performant, and maintainable through production support, maintenance, upgrades, and incident recovery; deliver 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Education Level: No Education Listed