About this role
Compute infrastructure lacks dependable and verifiable foundations at scale, leaving bare-metal and virtual machine hosts vulnerable without systematic trust boundaries. To solve this, OpenAI needs a Software Engineer for the Host Assurance team to build and operate services, APIs, and host software that establish and maintain trust in compute infrastructure. This team ensures that hosts are secure by default, verifiable in practice, and capable of safely running workloads with predictable security properties.
In this role, the engineer will own production software from design and implementation through testing, rollout, observability, and operation. Work directly supports machine identity, certificate issuance and enrollment, secure bootstrap, and host attestation across bare-metal and VM environments. Candidates who thrive here possess strong technical judgment, practical mindsets, and the ability to reason across software and host-system boundaries in fast-moving production environments.
What you will do
- Design, build, and operate components of the Host Assurance platform that establish trust in bare-metal and VM hosts before production use.
- Ensure hosts remain verifiably trustworthy from delivery and installation through secure bootstrap and readiness for orchestration systems.
- Build and improve systems such as machine identity, certificate issuance, HSM-backed trust services, host attestation, and baseline verification tooling.
- Validate delivered hardware and firmware against vendor claims while continuously detecting and managing drift over time.
- Eliminate insecure bootstrap patterns while preserving deployment throughput and operational reliability by partnering with fleet teams.
- Own software components through implementation, operational readiness, launch, monitoring, and ongoing operation including on-call rotation.
What you need
- Strong software engineering experience building and operating reliable production systems at scale.
- Depth in distributed systems, backend or platform engineering, operating systems, or infrastructure security.
- Ability to reason across services, APIs, and host software while learning boot, firmware, and hardware trust mechanisms.
- Experience writing production quality code with a clear understanding of failure modes, operational safety, and long-term maintainability.
- Experience supporting critical production systems at scale such as participating in an on-call rotation.
- Self-directed and pragmatic approach to making strong security controls deployable in real-world environments.
Nice to have
- Experience with PKI
- Experience with HSMs
- Experience with machine identity and attestation
- Experience with secure boot or hardware security
Benefits
- Offers Equity
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the salary range for this role?
The salary range for this position is $266K – $445K and includes offers of equity.
Where is the position located?
This role is located in San Francisco.
What kind of systems will I be building?
You will build and operate the services, APIs, and host software that establish and maintain trust in compute infrastructure, supporting machine identity, certificate issuance, secure bootstrap, and host attestation.
Is on-call participation required?
Yes, you will participate in production support via an on-call rotation.