Software Engineer, Trusted Computing and Cryptography

About the Team

Security is at the foundation of OpenAI’s mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

The Security team protects OpenAI’s technology, people, and products. We are technical in what we build but are operational in how we do our work, and are committed to supporting all products and research at OpenAI. Our Security team tenets include: prioritizing for impact, enabling researchers, preparing for future transformative technologies, and engaging a robust security culture.

About the Role

Trusted Computing and Cryptography is an engineering and security team within the OpenAI Security organization. We focus on:

• deploying high-performance cryptography at scale

• key management (including secure offline physical backups, multi-party computation)

• trusted hardware enclaves that enable everything from boot measurements to GPU confidential computation

We're looking for a software engineer to join our team at OpenAI to help us build out and secure our critical computing infrastructure, focusing on trusted computing and cryptography at scale.

This role may be based remotely in the US with occasional travel to our San Francisco HQ or other offices as needed by the team or role. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Write high-quality, performance-critical code in Rust and Python.

• Work alongside researchers, engineers, and security experts to integrate and scale advanced cryptographic techniques into our production and research systems.

• Write foundational libraries to support cryptographic operations and ensure security best practices are embedded into our infrastructure.

• Design, implement, and maintain secure key management systems for production environments.

• Design and deploy systems that help us trust our infrastructure, using security primitives and technologies such as tpm2, Secure Boot, Nitro Enclaves, confidential computing, Intel SGX, and AMD-SEV.

• Research, design, and implement operating system-level security measures, such as remote attestation, runtime TPM measurement, and host integrity verification.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have extensive experience as a software engineer working on global-scale production systems.

• Are experienced in deploying cryptographic systems at scale, with a strong understanding of production cryptographic key management.

• Have familiarity with security primitives, including but not limited to TPM2, Secure Boot, secure enclaves, and confidential computing platforms.

• Have professional experience programming in Python and proficiency in Rust and/or C/C++.

• Own problems end-to-end and are willing to acquire any missing knowledge to get the job done.

• Have experience architecting, observing, and debugging production distributed systems.

• Exhibit a humble attitude, eagerness to help colleagues, and a commitment to the team’s success.

• Are self-directed and enjoy identifying the most important problems to tackle.

• Have experience rebuilding or significantly refactoring production systems to accommodate rapidly increasing scale.

• Have a good intuition for when off-the-shelf solutions will work and can quickly build tools to accelerate workflows when they won’t.

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, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. 

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.