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OpenAI's Global Affairs team is seeking an Agent Standards Specialist to lead the development and execution of external technical standards strategy for AI agents. This role bridges OpenAI's internal technical architecture with external standards bodies and policy stakeholders, ensuring that emerging agent standards—covering identity, delegated authority, discovery, communications, commerce, web access, provenance, and auditability—are shaped to enable safe, interoperable, and accountable agent operation.
You will own a focused workstream plan for core agent identity, discovery, and delegated-authorization standards, with adjacent work in agentic commerce, web access, provenance, and auditability. You will recommend OpenAI's posture (lead, shape, monitor, oppose, or decline) within assigned standards efforts based on technical maturity, governance quality, strategic leverage, and company priorities.
Key responsibilities include: developing technical standards positions that preserve distinctions among human principals, agents, workloads, tasks, sessions, and resources; shaping requirements for scoped delegation, credential lifecycle, revocation, discovery, and auditable action trails; embedding with Agent Security, Applied, and Platform teams to translate internal controls into credible specifications and assurance evidence; leading review and approval across Product, Security, Engineering, Legal, GRC, Global Affairs, and GTM; representing OpenAI in priority standards venues (IETF, OAuth, FIDO, OIDF, W3C, AAIF, NIST, ISO); and bringing external standards intelligence back into product and security roadmaps early to avoid friction.
This is both a builder and external-facing role. You will author and negotiate protocols, build coalitions, secure internal approvals, and create repeatable processes that reduce key-person risk. You act as an integrator—Security, Product, and Engineering retain ownership of architecture and implementation; you own workstream planning, standards translation, external representation, and handoff.
Ideal candidates have strong experience in technical standards, internet protocols, identity and access, security architecture, or applied cryptography. You should have authored or materially shaped normative specifications in serious standards or open-source settings. You understand OAuth, OIDC, FIDO, WebAuth, workload identity, delegated authority, and credential lifecycle. You can reason about agent trust as a composed stack and distinguish adopted standards from active drafts and exploratory ideas. You earn trust with engineers and security leaders while communicating clearly with lawyers, product leaders, executives, and external stakeholders. You have strong judgment in ambiguous, high-stakes environments and write clearly with discretion.
