Software Engineer, Host Assurance

Details

Security is foundational to OpenAI's mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Host Assurance team builds dependable and scalable foundations for bare-metal and virtual machine environments that are secure by default, verifiable in practice, and resilient across providers and operating models.

The role involves building and operating services, APIs, and host software that establish and maintain trust in compute infrastructure. This includes machine identity, certificate issuance and enrollment, secure bootstrap, and host attestation across bare-metal and VM environments. The engineer will own production software from design and implementation through testing, rollout, observability, and ongoing operation.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate components of the Host Assurance platform that establish trust in bare-metal and VM hosts before production use.
• Help ensure hosts are trustworthy from delivery and installation through secure bootstrap and readiness to join orchestration systems.
• Build and improve 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 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 create secure and usable deployment paths.
• Own software components through implementation, operational readiness, launch, and ongoing operation.
• Define readiness criteria, validate behavior under load and failure, establish monitoring and actionable alerts, plan staged rollouts and tested recovery procedures, and maintain runbooks.
• Participate in production support through an on-call rotation.
• Define observable and testable security properties for host platforms and improve the telemetry and validation needed to enforce them.
• Work across different deployment models and provider boundaries while maintaining consistent host trust outcomes.
• Collaborate with infrastructure, research, and confidential computing initiatives, including novel hardware platforms and emerging deployment models.

Requirements

• Strong software engineering experience building and operating reliable production systems at scale.
• Depth in distributed systems, backend or platform engineering, operating systems, or infrastructure security.
• Ability to reason across services, APIs, and host software, and learn relevant boot, firmware, and hardware trust mechanisms.
• Ability to apply sound judgment to trust boundaries, correctness, and safe failure behavior.
• Experience writing production-quality code and reasoning about failure modes, operational safety, and long-term maintainability.
• Experience supporting critical production systems at scale, such as through on-call work.
• Pragmatic approach to building security controls that are deployable in real-world environments.
• Self-directed, low-ego, and willing to work across disciplines on ambiguous, high-impact problems.
• Experience with PKI, HSMs, machine identity, attestation, secure boot, or hardware security is valuable but not required.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law.

Benefits

• Base salary range of $266,000–$445,000, plus equity.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax FSA, dependent care FSA, and commuter accounts.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, paid company holidays, and 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 office meals and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional benefits may include charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.