About the job
About Our Team
At OpenAI, security is integral to our mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Our Security team is dedicated to safeguarding OpenAI’s technology, personnel, and products. We take a technical approach to our builds while executing operationally, supporting every product and research initiative at OpenAI. Our core principles include focusing on impactful outcomes, empowering our researchers and developers, preparing for transformative technologies, and cultivating a strong, collaborative security culture.
About the Role
We are looking for a Principal Security Engineer to join our Infrastructure Security (InfraSec) team. InfraSec is responsible for protecting the backbone of OpenAI’s research and production environments, including GPU supercomputing clusters, multi-cloud infrastructure, data centers, networking, storage, and critical services that support our cutting-edge AI models. This role encompasses everything from bare-metal hardware and firmware to Kubernetes clusters, service meshes, and the secure data pathways that handle sensitive model weights and user information.
As a Principal Security Engineer, you will define the technical vision and lead the implementation of essential foundational services, such as authentication systems, egress/ingress proxies, access brokers, and key management solutions, maintaining high standards of reliability, scalability, and software craftsmanship. These systems are crucial for ensuring security in OpenAI’s customer and supercomputing environments, especially under high-demand and adversarial conditions.
Your Responsibilities:
Lead the design and strategic roadmap for core security services (e.g., authentication/authorization, policy enforcement, secure proxies, key management), overseeing their journey from conception through deployment and ongoing operation.
Design and develop large-scale security systems that ensure robust protections across hardware, operating systems, Kubernetes, networks, and CI/CD, while balancing security, reliability, latency, and developer usability.
Collaborate with cross-functional teams in infrastructure and research engineering to orchestrate secure deployments, shaping interfaces, migration strategies, and rollout plans for extensive fleets and critical workflows.
Develop and enhance security primitives (identity, attestation, authorization, encryption key lifecycle, access mediation) that serve as foundational blocks for OpenAI’s platform.
Utilize cutting-edge models and agents to create automation and detection tools aimed at continuously identifying and mitigating potential threats.

