Host Assurance Software Engineer: Secure, Scalable Systems

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI seeks a Software Engineer, Host Assurance to design, build, and operate services that establish trust in compute infrastructure. You will own production software from design to operation, supporting machine identity, certificate enrollment, and secure boot across bare-metal and VM environments.

This role requires strong engineering judgment, ability to reason across software and host-system boundaries, and a pragmatic mindset for secure, reliable systems at global scale.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering experience building production systems at scale.
• Experience with distributed systems and infrastructure security.
• Ability to reason across services, APIs, and host software.
• Experience on-call and maintaining reliability.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate Host Assurance components for bare-metal and VM hosts.
• Ensure hosts are trustworthy from delivery through secure bootstrap and join to orchestration.
• Improve machine identity, certificate issuance, enrollment, and attestation tooling.
• Validate hardware and firmware against vendor claims and manage drift.
• Eliminate insecure bootstrap patterns and partner with provisioning/fleet teams.
• Own software from design to runbook and monitor readiness and failures.
• Participate in on-call production support.
• Define observable security properties for host platforms and telemetry.
• Work across deployment models and provider boundaries for consistent trust outcomes.

Skills

Software engineering

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

Infrastructure security

PKI

HSMs

Machine identity

Attestation

Secure boot

On-call experience

Observability

Job description

OpenAI seeks a Software Engineer, Host Assurance to design, build, and operate services that establish trust in compute infrastructure. You will own production software from design to operation, supporting machine identity, certificate enrollment, and secure boot across bare-metal and VM environments.

This role requires strong engineering judgment, ability to reason across software and host-system boundaries, and a pragmatic mindset for secure, reliable systems at global scale.