Compensation
San Francisco or Seattle$293K – $385K • Offers Equity
The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
- Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
- 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
- Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
- Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
- 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
- Mental health and wellness support
- Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
- Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
- Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
- Relocation support for eligible employees
- Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.
About the Team
Security is foundational to OpenAI’s mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
About the Role
OpenAI is seeking a Security Engineer, Host Assurance to help build the trust foundations for bare-metal platforms across OpenAI’s global infrastructure. This is a deeply hands-on engineering role for a builder who can design, implement, and operate the core security infrastructure that establishes trust in hardware platforms before they are eligible to run workloads.
In this role, you will:
- Design, build, and operate components of the Host Assurance platform that establish trust in bare-metal hosts before they are eligible for production use.
- Help ensure hosts are verifiably trustworthy from delivery and installation through secure bootstrap and readiness to join orchestration systems.
- Build and improve systems such as machine identity, certificate issuance and enrollment, HSM-backed or key-management-backed trust services, host attestation, measurement, and baseline verification tooling.
- Validate delivered hardware and firmware against vendor claims and continuously detect and manage drift over time.
- Eliminate insecure bootstrap patterns while preserving deployment throughput and operational reliability. Partner with provisioning, fleet, and orchestration teams to deliver paved paths where the secure approach is the easiest approach.
- Contribute code, reviews, operational improvements, and design guidance for foundational trust services that must be dependable at scale.
- Help define observable, testable security properties for host platforms and improve the telemetry and validation needed to enforce them in practice.
- Participate in incident response, debugging, and post-incident improvements for security-critical infrastructure.
- Work across different deployment models and provider boundaries while maintaining a consistent bar for host trust outcomes.
You might thrive in this role if you:
- Have strong software engineering experience building and operating reliable production systems at scale.
- Have deep expertise in at least one relevant domain such as PKI, HSMs, machine identity, applied cryptography, secure boot, firmware or hardware security, host attestation, or low-level platform security.
- Are comfortable working across systems boundaries, from services and APIs down to host, boot, firmware, or hardware-adjacent trust mechanisms.
- Can write production quality code and reason clearly about failure modes, operational safety, and long-term maintainability.
- Have experience replacing fragile or manual security mechanisms with durable, paved-path infrastructure.
- 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.
Workplace & Location
- This role is preferably based in San Francisco, CA or Seattle, WA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
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.
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