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The Identity Infrastructure Engineering team at OpenAI builds identity and access systems that protect critical infrastructure and data used by researchers, engineers, and internal teams. This role focuses on designing and building high-scale, high-throughput secure access proxies and the distributed systems supporting them—tier-zero services that researchers, engineers, and AI agents depend on for safe and reliable access to critical infrastructure.
You will work at the intersection of networking, distributed systems, and infrastructure security. Key responsibilities include:
- Design and implement secure access proxies, gateways, and credential brokers that provide narrowly scoped, auditable access while reducing standing privileges.
- Integrate identity and access policy across clients, proxies, and target systems, ensuring approved permissions take effect promptly and access expires or is revoked as required. Handle edge cases where policy is stale or sessions remain active.
- Build end-to-end observability for the access path: latency, errors, saturation, authorization decisions, and identity attribution without leaking credentials.
- Engineer safe multi-region rollouts, canaries, rollback, failover, and recovery. Validate changes with realistic test environments, load tests, and failure testing.
- Own production support, maintenance, upgrades, and incident recovery. Ship durable fixes that reduce recurring failures, alert noise, and manual work.
- Make secure access easy to adopt through reusable APIs, client tooling, diagnostics, and self-service workflows. Lead migrations that preserve critical workflows with tested rollback and recovery paths.
You will own the services you build from design and implementation through production, understanding human, agent, and workload traffic patterns and optimizing for throughput and tail latency.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Built and operated production backend, proxy, networking, or infrastructure services with demanding scale or availability requirements.
- Practical networking depth: can reason about HTTP, TCP, TLS, DNS, routing, and load balancing across real request paths.
- Experience handling performance bottlenecks, partial failures, multi-region deployment, or difficult production changes in systems you personally built.
- Understanding of authentication, authorization, least privilege, trust boundaries, credential handling, and consequences of access-control failures.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience with Go, Rust, Python, or similar languages.
- Use tests, profiling, telemetry, and reproducible experiments to debug across system boundaries and verify correctness, performance, and recovery.
- Practical scope decisions, clear communication of tradeoffs, and follow-through from code to production.
- Teleport or comparable access-platform experience is helpful; strong engineering and production ownership matter more than knowing every tool.
