Engineering Manager, Identity & Access Platform

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is looking for an engineering leader to head the Identity Infrastructure Engineering team based in San Francisco, California. This role involves overseeing systems for access management across OpenAI’s platforms while ensuring security and reliability.

The ideal candidate will have over 10 years of experience in building engineering teams and managing security-focused infrastructure. The position emphasizes collaboration across various teams and the transformation of complex infrastructure into trusted systems.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience building and developing engineering teams.
• Experience in security-critical production systems.
• Hands-on technical depth in code and architecture.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a high-performing Identity Infrastructure team.
• Define strategy for identity platform as the policy plane.
• Establish first-class authorization for agents and workloads.

Skills

Leadership in engineering

Security-critical system management

Cloud infrastructure

Identity and access management

Policy enforcement

Job description

About the Team

Security is at the foundation of OpenAI's mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Identity Infrastructure Engineering team sits at the core of this effort, designing and building the identity and access management solutions that protect model weights, customer data, and critical systems across multiple cloud environments.

The team partners across OpenAI, including Applied Engineering, Research, IT, Security, Infrastructure, and Engineering, to provide secure and scalable platforms for identity, access management, permissioning, orchestration, and safe AI research.

About the Role

We’re looking for an engineering leader to lead Identity Infrastructure Engineering, the team building the systems that govern and scale access across OpenAI’s research, engineering, and internal platforms.

This role sits at the center of cloud infrastructure, identity, software engineering, and security-critical operations. You’ll lead engineers building control planes, policy systems, workload and agent authorization patterns, infrastructure-as-code, and operational foundations that help OpenAI move quickly while keeping access reliable, auditable, least-privileged, and safe under failure.

The ideal candidate has led teams responsible for large-scale, mission-critical infrastructure. They can go deep into code and architecture when needed, while giving engineers and technical leads the clarity and ownership to do their best work. They set technical direction, grow strong teams, make durable architecture decisions, and turn ambiguous 0-to-1 problems into platforms OpenAI can trust and build on for years.

In this role, you will

• Build and lead a high-performing Identity Infrastructure team, going deep enough technically to set direction while empowering the team to own delivery.
• Define the strategy for identity platform as the policy plane for access across people, agents, workloads, services, clouds, and internal systems.
• Scale Access Manager for evolving human and agent lifecycles, making routine access automatic and sensitive access contextual, time-bound, and accountable.
• Build the access graph and resource catalog that make access decisions explainable, risk-aware, and grounded in ownership, sensitivity, environment, and usage.
• Replace broad standing privilege with risk-tiered access, so routine work stays fast, privileged access is narrow and observable, and break‑glass is exceptional.
• Establish first‑class authorization for agents and workloads, with delegated, action-scoped permissions, time‑bound access, full attribution, and no credential sharing.
• Partner across Security, Infrastructure, Applied, Research, IT, and product to turn identity standards into systems teams trust and adopt.
• Operate identity infrastructure as a mission‑critical platform, with clear reliability goals, safe rollouts, strong observability, healthy on‑call, and rigorous incident learning.
• Measure success by safer, faster, and more accountable access: reduced unnecessary privilege, stronger governance, broader coverage, clearer auditability, and less friction for legitimate work.

You might thrive in this role if you

• Have 10+ years building and developing engineering teams that own large scale platforms.
• Experience owning security critical production systems where reliability, least privilege, auditability, and operational rigor are essential.
• Deep judgment across cloud infrastructure, IAM, authentication, authorization, workload identity, privileged access, and policy enforcement.
• Hands‑on technical depth to go into code and architecture, pressure‑test designs, and guide tradeoffs across correctness, performance, scale, and operability.
• Track record turning complex infrastructure problems into adopted platforms across Engineering, Security, Research, and internal teams.
• High bar for engineering quality, operational discipline, and long-term ownership.

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 Aff…

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.

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