Security Software Engineer, HSM Infrastructure & Trust

OpenAI; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 347,000 - 445,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI seeks a Security Software Engineer to design hardware-backed security foundations for the device ecosystem. You will work on the HSM trust boundary, secure provisioning, key management, and policy enforcement across hardware and software layers.

This hands-on role requires production-grade C/C++/Rust code, cryptographic primitives, and collaboration with hardware, firmware, and backend teams to raise security standards.

Qualifications

• 5+ years experience building secure embedded firmware for constrained environments.
• Deep programming experience in C, C++, or Rust.
• Hands-on security-critical software or firmware within, or directly adjacent to, an HSM, secure element, TEE, or hardware root of trust.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to collaborate across hardware, firmware, backend, and product teams.

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.

Skills

Secure embedded firmware

C/C++/Rust

Security-critical software

Collaboration across teams

Tools

PKCS#11

OpenSSL providers

HSM platforms

Device drivers

Job description

OpenAI seeks a Security Software Engineer to design hardware-backed security foundations for the device ecosystem. You will work on the HSM trust boundary, secure provisioning, key management, and policy enforcement across hardware and software layers.

This hands-on role requires production-grade C/C++/Rust code, cryptographic primitives, and collaboration with hardware, firmware, and backend teams to raise security standards.