Security-Focused Software Engineer, Host Assurance

OpenAI; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a Software Engineer, Host Assurance to design, build, and operate services and host software that establish and maintain trust in our compute infrastructure. You will own production software from design through testing, rollout, observability, and operation, enabling secure bootstrap, machine identity, and host attestation across bare-metal and VM environments.

The role requires strong software engineering skills, experience with distributed systems, and the ability to reason

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering experience building production systems at scale.
• Experience with distributed systems, backend or platform engineering, operating systems, or infrastructure security.
• Knowledge of PKI, HSMs, machine identity or attestation is a plus.
• Ability to reason across services, APIs and host software and understand hardware trust mechanisms.
• Experience supporting critical production systems, including on-call duties.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate components of the Host Assurance platform that establish trust in both bare-metal and VM hosts before they are eligible for production use.
• Help ensure hosts are verifiably trustworthy from delivery and installation through secure bootstrap and readiness to join orchestration systems.
• Build and improve systems such as machine identity, certificate issuance and enrollment, HSM-backed or key-management-backed trust services, host attestation, measurement, and baseline verification tooling.
• Validate delivered hardware and firmware against vendor claims and detect drift over time.
• Eliminate insecure bootstrap patterns while preserving deployment throughput and operability; partner with provisioning, fleet, and orchestration teams to make the secure path the easiest path.
• Own software components through implementation, readiness, launch, and ongoing operation; define readiness criteria, monitor behavior under load, and maintain runbooks.
• Participate in production support via on-call rotation.
• Help define observable security properties for host platforms and improve telemetry and validation to enforce them in practice.
• Work across deployment models and provider boundaries while maintaining a consistent bar for host trust outcomes.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

PKI

HSMs

Security engineering

On-call

Job description

OpenAI is seeking a Software Engineer, Host Assurance to design, build, and operate services and host software that establish and maintain trust in our compute infrastructure. You will own production software from design through testing, rollout, observability, and operation, enabling secure bootstrap, machine identity, and host attestation across bare-metal and VM environments.

The role requires strong software engineering skills, experience with distributed systems, and the ability to reason