Software Engineer - Privacy & Compliance

Details

We’re looking for a Software Engineer to architect and build backend systems that enforce data privacy and automate compliance at scale. You’ll work closely with product, infrastructure, security, and legal teams to embed privacy-by-design into our data and access layers.

This is a hands-on, high-impact role for an experienced engineer who is passionate about protecting user data while enabling innovation.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend services that enforce policy-driven data access, lifecycle controls, and privacy protections.
• Develop distributed authorization and identity-aware enforcement mechanisms integrated directly into data services and control planes.
• Implement auditability, policy hooks, and enforcement observability to ensure compliance is continuously verifiable.
• Partner with Security, Legal, and Compliance to convert privacy requirements into scalable technical designs and developer-friendly APIs.
• Harden data platforms and backend services through schema-level controls and data handling constraints by default.
• Collaborate with infrastructure teams to ensure consistent enforcement across systems while minimizing duplicated implementations.
• Contribute patterns, libraries, and education that elevate trustworthy data access patterns across the organization.

Requirements

• 5+ years of industry experience building and operating backend or infrastructure systems in production.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, with fluency in at least one major programming language (e.g., Python, Go, Rust, C++, Java).
• Experience with distributed authorization, RBAC/ACL systems, encryption-based access, or policy engines.
• Familiarity with global privacy regulations and their architectural implications.
• Ability to influence and collaborate with teams across legal, compliance, product, and engineering.
• A bias toward practical, impactful solutions that balance privacy protections with product needs.

Nice to Have

• Experience with cloud platforms (e.g., Azure, AWS, GCP) and large-scale data systems.
• Background in security engineering, privacy engineering, or data governance.
• Experience with control-plane or metadata-driven enforcement systems.
• Exposure to data platforms or ML infrastructure.
• Prior experience in a regulated or highly sensitive data environment.

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.