Full-Stack Engineer for Privacy & Legal Data Ops

OpenAI; California (MO); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a full-stack Software Engineer for the Privacy Engineering team in a hybrid role. Based in San Francisco with London and Dublin locations under consideration, you will build internal tools and data pipelines for lawful data access workflows and Legal Operations.

You will translate ambiguous requirements into durable systems, ensure secure handling of sensitive data, and drive reliability, observability, and operator experience across workflows.

Qualifications

• Strong backend engineering fundamentals and experience building production services or data-intensive systems.
• End-to-end ownership with responsibility for reliability and operability of systems.
• Ability to reason carefully about correctness, authorization, security, and privacy when handling sensitive data.
• Experience collaborating across Engineering, Legal, Operations, Privacy, and Security stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend systems and workflow tooling for lawful data access requests from intake through retrieval, review, preparation, and audit.
• Build reliable data pipelines and interfaces across products and data stores to locate and handle records accurately and reproducibly.
• Implement least-privilege access, approval gates, provenance, audit trails, data minimization, and safe failure modes for sensitive workflows.
• Partner with Legal and Legal Operations to translate legal and operational requirements into clear designs and operator experiences.
• Identify automation opportunities that reduce repetitive work while preserving human review and accountability.
• Own production systems through testing, observability, incident response, documentation, and reliability improvements.
• Help define architecture and roadmap for reusable privacy and legal-infrastructure foundations as OpenAI evolves.

Skills

Backend engineering

Data pipelines

Security-conscious design

Operator experience mindset

Collaborative cross-functional

Tools

Python

Go

SQL

ETL

Job description

OpenAI is seeking a full-stack Software Engineer for the Privacy Engineering team in a hybrid role. Based in San Francisco with London and Dublin locations under consideration, you will build internal tools and data pipelines for lawful data access workflows and Legal Operations.

You will translate ambiguous requirements into durable systems, ensure secure handling of sensitive data, and drive reliability, observability, and operator experience across workflows.