Software Engineer, Privacy Engineering

About the Team

The Privacy Engineering team builds the systems and technical foundations that govern how user data is understood, retained, accessed, and used across OpenAI. We partner with Product, Data, Infrastructure, Security, and Legal to translate policy and trust commitments into durable architecture and enforceable controls.

Our work spans data inventory and mapping, classification and lineage, retention and deletion, access governance, purpose and usage controls, auditability, and lifecycle automation. We aim to make policy-aligned data handling the default while giving teams clear, reliable primitives for building and operating products at scale.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have substantial experience designing and operating large-scale data platforms, privacy infrastructure, or governance systems in complex production environments.
• Have led architecture and multi-team execution for one or more data-governance domains, such as metadata and lineage, retention and deletion, access governance, or data-use controls.
• Can translate ambiguous policy, legal, security, and product requirements into clear system boundaries, technical standards, phased roadmaps, and measurable outcomes.
• Influence senior stakeholders and engineering teams without relying on formal authority, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and build durable cross-functional alignment.
• Take end-to-end ownership of high-trust systems, including correctness, scalability, auditability, operational resilience, and the developer and operator experience.

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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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

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.