In Seattle, OpenAI is hiring a Security Software Engineer to design and implement hardware-backed security foundations for the consumer device ecosystem. This hands-on engineering role suits an experienced developer focused on building and hardening critical boundaries between policy systems and hardware security modules.
Role Overview
OpenAI seeks a Software Engineer for HSM Infrastructure Security within Consumer Devices in Seattle. This is a hands-on engineering position dedicated to designing, building, and hardening the security boundaries that protect sensitive cryptographic keys and policy systems. The role involves writing production code, debugging across hardware and software boundaries, and executing projects from initial requirements through deployment.
Key Responsibilities
Design and implement security-critical software and firmware for HSMs, secure elements, trusted execution environments, and hardware roots of trust.
Build and harden the policy-to-HSM boundary responsible for authorizing certificate issuance and cryptographic signing operations.
Develop HSM trusted applications, firmware components, host interfaces, device drivers, SDKs, or cryptographic service integrations.
Implement or extend cryptographic interfaces such as PKCS#11, OpenSSL providers or engines, platform key-storage APIs, or comparable hardware-security interfaces.
Build firmware and software that cryptographically enforces key generation, provisioning, usage, rotation, recovery, and destruction policies.
Design and implement HSM-backed certificate authority, code-signing, key-management, and device-identity systems.
Develop end-to-end cryptographic protocols spanning devices, secure hardware, policy services, and backend infrastructure.
Build security capabilities supporting device attestation, secure boot, factory provisioning and restoration, user registration, and authentication.
Design controls that make trusted software and policy changes verifiable, auditable, and subject to appropriate multi-party authorization.
Write, review, test, and audit secure embedded software for resource-constrained environments.
Develop test harnesses, emulators, fuzzers, and fault-injection tooling to validate security properties and failure behavior.
Threat-model hardware and software trust boundaries and translate findings into concrete engineering improvements.
Partner with hardware, firmware, infrastructure, application, and security teams to integrate secure-by-default capabilities into production systems.
Help establish engineering standards for HSM development, applied cryptography, secure key management, and certificate infrastructure.
Requirements
Minimum of 5 years of experience building secure embedded firmware for constrained environments.
Deep programming experience in C, C++, or Rust.
Nice to Have
Firmware development for ARM TrustZone or another trusted execution environment.
Experience with commercial or cloud HSM platforms such as Thales Luna, Entrust/nShield, Utimaco, Marvell LiquidSecurity, or AWS CloudHSM.
Experience with PKCS#11, KMIP, OpenSSL providers or engines, secure-element APIs, or platform-native key-storage frameworks.
Device manufacturing, secure provisioning, factory restore, or silicon bring-up experience.
Secure boot ROM, bootloader, firmware-signing, anti-rollback, or authenticated-update development.
Developing trusted applications or cryptographic services inside an HSM or secure coprocessor.
Hardware/software co-design involving cryptographic accelerators, secure processors, or custom silicon.
Multi-party authorization, quorum-controlled deployments, tamper-resistant audit mechanisms, or attestable policy systems.
Secure or private storage systems based on hardware-protected keys.
Experience sustaining high-assurance security software in production.
Skills and Tools
C, C++, Rust
PKCS#11, OpenSSL, KMIP
Hardware Security Modules (HSM), Secure Elements, Trusted Execution Environments (TEE)
X.509 Certificates, PKI
Salary and Benefits
Salary range: $347K – $445K
Offers Equity
About the Company
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The organization pushes the boundaries of AI capabilities and seeks to safely deploy them through its products while valuing diverse perspectives, voices, and experiences. OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer.
How to Apply
Apply on the official company careers page.
