Staff Security Reliability Engineer

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 293,000 - 385,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity offers

Equal opportunity employer

Job summary

OpenAI is looking for a Senior Security Reliability Engineer in San Francisco to design, build, and operate secure infrastructure. This critical role emphasizes the application of Site Reliability Engineering principles to maintain operational excellence in identity, access, and infrastructure services.

Your expertise will help drive initiatives that emphasize system reliability and security while enhancing operational efficiencies. This position requires in-office presence and offers a collaborative environment to leverage your experience in high-reliability systems.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with mission-critical infrastructure.
• Senior ownership of complex on-prem or cloud-integrated systems.
• Experience working in high-risk operational environments.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate reliable and secure infrastructure.
• Establish standardized infrastructure patterns.
• Own the lifecycle of critical infrastructure platforms.

Skills

Site Reliability Engineering principles

Infrastructure architecture

High-reliability environments

Automation

Technical writing

Education

10+ years of relevant experience

Tools

Terraform

Chef

Ansible

Job description

Staff Security Reliability Engineer | OpenAI

Security - San Francisco

About the Team

The Infrastructure Engineering function sits within IT and is responsible for reliably building, deploying, and operating critical on prem and hybrid environments that power internal services and critical R&D environments.

This is an early, high-leverage technical role focused on applying strong Site Reliability Engineering discipline to environments where uptime, safety, recoverability, and security are non‑negotiable. This person helps replace bespoke, one‑off infrastructure with standardized infrastructure‑as‑code building blocks that compound reliability and operational leverage as OpenAI scales.

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced Security Reliability Engineer to design, build, and operate reliable, secure, and scalable infrastructure that underpins identity, access, endpoint, and shared platform services across the company.

In this role, you will be a senior technical owner for infrastructure and identity systems end to end, from architecture and implementation through policy enforcement, upgrades, recovery, and day‑two operations. You will build durable, production‑grade platforms that remove operational friction, enforce security by default, and enable teams to move faster with confidence.

This role is well suited for a hands‑on senior engineer who thrives in ambiguity, enjoys owning complex systems end to end, and raises the reliability and security bar by replacing fragile implementations with standardized, repeatable infrastructure.

This role is based in our San Francisco HQ and requires in‑office presence.

In this role, you will:

• Design, build, and operate reliable infrastructure across on‑prem, hybrid, shared, and product adjacent environments.
• Establish standardized infrastructure patterns that replace bespoke implementations with repeatable, auditable, secure‑by‑default systems.
• Own the lifecycle of critical infrastructure platforms, including provisioning, deployment, upgrades, patching, recovery, and long‑term reliability.
• Build infrastructure‑as‑code and configuration management using tools such as Terraform, Chef, and Ansible.
• Mature identity adjacent and policy enforced infrastructure, including Microsoft Entra and Azure management patterns.
• Build observability, alerting, and incident response mechanisms that improve availability, recoverability, and operational confidence.
• Automate high‑toil and high‑risk workflows with guardrails, progressive rollout patterns, and safe rollback paths.
• Translate incidents, design reviews, and operational learnings into durable fixes, reusable patterns, and stronger technical standards.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 10+ years of hands‑on experience operating and architecting mission‑critical infrastructure in high‑reliability environments.
• Have been the senior technical owner for the design and maturation of complex on‑prem, hybrid, or cloud‑integrated systems, setting durable architectural patterns used by multiple teams.
• Apply Site Reliability Engineering principles at scale, using observability, automation, and incident learnings to materially reduce risk and operational toil.
• Operate comfortably in ambiguity, making sound architectural decisions under pressure while staying close to technical detail.
• Influence cross‑functional partners across security, identity, network, and platform teams through architecture, implementation, operational data, and clear technical writing.
• Have experience operating infrastructure for R&D or specialized labs, manufacturing, or other safety critical environments where uptime and recoverability are essential.
• Have experience with fleet, endpoint, or virtual desktop platforms such as FleetDM, Chef, or Azure Virtual Desktop.
• Have experience partnering closely with identity or security engineering teams on hardened, policy enforced infrastructure at scale.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general‑purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

Equity and Opportunities

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.

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. 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…

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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

Compensation

$293K – $385K + Offers Equity