Software Engineer, Host Assurance

About the Team

Security is foundational to OpenAI’s mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

The Security organization protects OpenAI’s technology, people, and products by building and operating deeply technical systems that must work reliably at massive scale. Our work underpins OpenAI’s commitments around safety, privacy, and security across research, products, and emerging platforms.

The Host Assurance team exists to make bare metal and VMs dependable & scalable foundations for OpenAI: secure by default, verifiable in practice, and resilient across providers and operating models. We operate at the trust boundary between hardware and cloud-scale orchestration, ensuring that hosts are eligible to safely run workloads with predictable security properties and auditability.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have strong software engineering experience building and operating reliable production systems at scale.
• Bring depth in distributed systems, backend or platform engineering, operating systems, or infrastructure security. Experience with PKI, HSMs, machine identity, attestation, secure boot, or hardware security is valuable but not required.
• Can reason across services, APIs, and host software, and learn the boot, firmware, and hardware trust mechanisms relevant to your work. Apply sound judgment to trust boundaries, correctness, and safe failure behavior.
• Have experience writing production quality code and ability to reason clearly about failure modes, operational safety, and long-term maintainability.
• Have experience supporting critical production systems at scale, such as being on-call.
• Balance rigor with pragmatism, and care about making strong security controls deployable in real-world environments.
• Are self-directed, low ego, and willing to work across disciplines to solve the most important problems.
• Enjoy building in ambiguous spaces where the architecture is still emerging, stakes are at all time high, and the future is being built.

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 capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.