Engineering Manager, Identity Infrastructure

Details

Identity is the foundation of trust in an AI-powered world. As people build a rich personal and organizational context in ChatGPT, they need systems that protect it, remember it, and let them share it securely across apps and agents. Our team builds the trusted OpenAI account layer that connects people, enterprises, developers, and agents to OpenAI apps and the broader AI ecosystem. These systems are held to a high bar for availability, security, and latency and are depended on by many internal teams.

About the Role

As an Engineering Manager, Identity Infrastructure, you will lead a team owning foundational identity services that must be highly reliable, secure, and fast under extreme load. You will set direction, grow and support the team, and partner closely across engineering and security to strengthen the platform that enables trusted access to OpenAI products. We are looking for people who combine strong infrastructure depth with people leadership—someone who can guide technical strategy, run reliable operations, and build a high-performing team delivering mission-critical systems.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. The team uses a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and OpenAI offers relocation assistance to new employees.

Responsibilities

• Build, lead, and develop a high-performing engineering team. Coach and mentor engineers and senior technical leads to increase their impact and support their growth.
• Define and own the technical strategy, roadmap, and execution for OpenAI's core identity systems.
• Guide the architecture of distributed systems operating at massive scale, with high requirements for reliability, privacy, and performance.
• Partner closely with Product and Infrastructure teams to support new product needs and uphold high system standards.
• Ensure the team operates effectively, maintains strong engineering rigor, and consistently delivers against ambitious goals.
• Establish processes and a culture that enable fast learning, high trust, and responsible innovation.
• Lead the team responsible for the authentication stack and token exchange infrastructure, ensuring high availability, strong security posture, and low-latency performance.
• Own and improve request validation at the edge for logged-in users, delivering extremely high reliability and fast validation under high throughput.
• Oversee systems that enable secure access to user data, improving scalability, reliability, and access patterns for internal consumers across the company.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience managing high-performance engineering teams in fast-paced, rapidly shifting environments.
• 10+ years of experience building, scaling, and operating distributed systems at large scale.
• Experience managing an infrastructure team and demonstrated effectiveness at hiring, coaching, and developing engineers while maintaining strong operational excellence.
• Deep experience building and operating high-scale backend systems, with a track record of improving reliability, latency, and security in production.
• Broad infrastructure expertise across the stack — from hardware and cluster management to services and storage layers.
• Strong people leadership, coaching, and the ability to help engineers achieve peak performance.
• Excellent communication and decision-making grounded in user needs and long-term sustainability.

Benefits

In addition to the base pay range listed in the posting, total compensation includes generous equity and performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees. Benefits include:

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental leave and paid medical and caregiver leave.
• Flexible paid time off and paid company holidays and office closures.
• Mental health and wellness support; employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend, daily meals in offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.

OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. Additional company policies and applicant privacy information are available via OpenAI's public policy documents.