Security Engineer, Host Assurance

Details

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 a dependable, scalable foundation for OpenAI: secure by default, verifiable in practice, and resilient across providers and operating models. We operate at the trust boundary between physical hardware and cloud-scale orchestration, ensuring that hosts are eligible to safely run workloads with predictable security properties and auditability.

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.

Success in this role requires strong technical judgment, the ability to work comfortably at low levels of the stack, and a practical mindset for building systems that are secure, reliable, and usable in fast-moving production environments. The systems you build will sit on the critical path of OpenAI’s frontier infrastructure investments and will directly shape how large amounts of compute are brought online — securely, responsibly, and at global scale — underpinning long-lived commitments around privacy, security, and reliability.

You will partner closely with infrastructure, research, and confidential computing initiatives — including novel hardware platforms and emerging deployment models — to make the secure path the easiest path. This role is well suited for engineers who enjoy working across trust services, operating systems, hardware and firmware validation, and infrastructure security, and who are excited by ambiguous, high-impact problems at the boundary of hardware and large-scale systems.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate components of the Host Assurance platform that establish trust in bare-metal hosts before they are eligible for production use.
• 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.

Requirements

• Strong software engineering experience building and operating reliable production systems at scale; ability to write production-quality code and reason about failure modes and operational safety.
• 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.
• Comfortable working across systems boundaries, from services and APIs down to host, boot, firmware, or hardware-adjacent trust mechanisms.
• Experience replacing fragile or manual security mechanisms with durable, paved-path infrastructure.
• Operational mindset: telemetry, validation, incident response, and debugging for security-critical systems.
• Self-directed, collaborative, pragmatic approach to solving ambiguous, high-impact problems.

Workplace & Location

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

Benefits & Additional Compensation Info

• Base pay range: $293,000 – $385,000 (San Francisco or Seattle). Offers include equity and may vary by market/location, skills, and experience.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts (Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, commuter expenses).
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental leave and paid medical/caregiver leave.
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees.
• 13+ paid company holidays and additional paid office closures; paid sick or safe time as required by law.
• 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; additional taxable fringe benefits like donation matching and wellness stipends.

Other Notes

• OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.
• Background checks will be administered in accordance with applicable law.
• Additional company policies and applicant privacy policy links are provided in the original posting.