Staff Security Reliability Engineer

Details

About the Team

The Infrastructure Engineering function sits within IT and is responsible for reliably building, deploying, and operating critical on prem and hybrid environments that power internal services and critical R&D environments.

This is an early, high-leverage technical role focused on applying strong Site Reliability Engineering discipline to environments where uptime, safety, recoverability, and security are non-negotiable. This person helps replace bespoke, one-off infrastructure with standardized infrastructure-as-code building blocks that compound reliability and operational leverage as OpenAI scales.

Role summary

We are looking for an experienced Security Reliability Engineer to design, build, and operate reliable, secure, and scalable infrastructure that underpins identity, access, endpoint, and shared platform services across the company. In this role you will be a senior technical owner for infrastructure and identity systems end to end, from architecture and implementation through policy enforcement, upgrades, recovery, and day-two operations. You will build durable, production-grade platforms that remove operational friction, enforce security by default, and enable teams to move faster with confidence.

This role is based in our San Francisco HQ and requires in-office presence.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate reliable infrastructure across on-prem, hybrid, shared, and product-adjacent environments.
• Establish standardized infrastructure patterns that replace bespoke implementations with repeatable, auditable, secure-by-default systems.
• Own the lifecycle of critical infrastructure platforms, including provisioning, deployment, upgrades, patching, recovery, and long-term reliability.
• Build infrastructure-as-code and configuration management using tools such as Terraform, Chef, and Ansible.
• Mature identity-adjacent and policy-enforced infrastructure, including Microsoft Entra and Azure management patterns.
• Build observability, alerting, and incident response mechanisms that improve availability, recoverability, and operational confidence.
• Automate high-toil and high-risk workflows with guardrails, progressive rollout patterns, and safe rollback paths.
• Translate incidents, design reviews, and operational learnings into durable fixes, reusable patterns, and stronger technical standards.

Requirements / Qualifications

• 10+ years of hands-on experience operating and architecting mission-critical infrastructure in high-reliability environments.
• Experience as the senior technical owner for the design and maturation of complex on-prem, hybrid, or cloud-integrated systems, setting durable architectural patterns used by multiple teams.
• Ability to apply Site Reliability Engineering principles at scale, using observability, automation, and incident learnings to materially reduce risk and operational toil.
• Experience operating infrastructure for R&D or specialized labs, manufacturing, or other safety-critical environments where uptime and recoverability are essential.
• Experience with fleet, endpoint, or virtual desktop platforms such as FleetDM, Chef, or Azure Virtual Desktop.
• Experience partnering closely with identity or security engineering teams on hardened, policy-enforced infrastructure at scale.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and making sound architectural decisions under pressure while staying close to technical detail.
• Strong cross-functional influence across security, identity, network, and platform teams through architecture, implementation, operational data, and clear technical writing.

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. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core. OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides information about applicant privacy, accommodations, and compliance reporting in the posting.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit).
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks).
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees.
• 13+ paid company holidays and multiple coordinated company office closures throughout the year, plus 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 such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.