Engineering Manager, Identity & Access Platform

Details

Security is at the foundation of OpenAI's mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Identity Infrastructure Engineering team designs and builds identity and access management solutions that protect model weights, customer data, and critical systems across multiple cloud environments.

The team partners across Applied Engineering, Research, IT, Security, Infrastructure, and Engineering to provide secure and scalable platforms for identity, access management, permissioning, orchestration, and safe AI research.

The role leads Identity Infrastructure Engineering, which builds systems governing and scaling access across OpenAI's research, engineering, and internal platforms. The work spans cloud infrastructure, identity, software engineering, and security-critical operations, including control planes, policy systems, workload and agent authorization patterns, infrastructure-as-code, and operational foundations.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a high-performing Identity Infrastructure team, setting technical direction while empowering the team to own delivery.
• Define the strategy for the identity platform as the policy plane for access across people, agents, workloads, services, clouds, and internal systems.
• Scale Access Manager for evolving human and agent lifecycles, making routine access automatic and sensitive access contextual, time-bound, and accountable.
• Build the access graph and resource catalog to make access decisions explainable, risk-aware, and grounded in ownership, sensitivity, environment, and usage.
• Replace broad standing privilege with risk-tiered access, keeping routine work fast while making privileged access narrow and observable.
• Establish authorization for agents and workloads, with delegated, action-scoped permissions, time-bound access, full attribution, and no credential sharing.
• Partner across Security, Infrastructure, Applied, Research, IT, and product teams to turn identity standards into systems teams trust and adopt.
• Operate identity infrastructure as a mission-critical platform with clear reliability goals, safe rollouts, strong observability, healthy on-call practices, and rigorous incident learning.
• Measure success through safer, faster, and more accountable access, including reduced unnecessary privilege, stronger governance, broader coverage, clearer auditability, and less friction for legitimate work.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience building and developing engineering teams that own large-scale platforms.
• Experience owning security-critical production systems where reliability, least privilege, auditability, and operational rigor are essential.
• Deep judgment across cloud infrastructure, IAM, authentication, authorization, workload identity, privileged access, and policy enforcement.
• Hands-on technical depth to review code and architecture, pressure-test designs, and guide trade-offs across correctness, performance, scale, and operability.
• A track record of turning complex infrastructure problems into adopted platforms across Engineering, Security, Research, and internal teams.
• A high bar for engineering quality, operational discipline, and long-term ownership.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company pushes the boundaries of AI capabilities and seeks to safely deploy them through its products.

OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and does 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 characteristics. Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law. OpenAI is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.