Systems Software Engineer, Security, First Party Hardware

OpenAI; United States; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI’s Hardware organization leads the end-to-end security foundation for first-party AI hardware systems. You will own boot integrity, device identity, attestation, and secure management across development to deployment, collaborating with silicon, firmware, infrastructure, and operations teams.

Relocation assistance is available; located in San Francisco, CA with hybrid onsite requirements. The role focuses on turning threat models into concrete security requirements, implementing resilient

Qualifications

• Experience designing security for hardware platforms and data-center scale.
• Ability to translate threat models into verifiable requirements and evidence.
• Hands-on work with boot processes, cryptographic protection, and secure firmware.

Responsibilities

• Own security requirements, threat models, validation strategy, and launch-readiness evidence for first-party hardware platforms from design through production deployment.
• Design and review secure boot, measured boot, roots of trust, platform firmware resilience, firmware signing, recovery, and anti-rollback strategies across devices.
• Own device identity, provisioning, enrollment, attestation, certificate lifecycle, and key-management requirements across manufacturing and data center bring-up.
• Harden management

Skills

Security engineering

Secure boot

Threat modeling

Device identity

Firmware security

Key management

Tools

PKI

Job description

About the Team

OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform.

About the Role

We're seeking a Security Engineer to join our First-Party Hardware team. In this role, you will own the end-to-end security foundation for OpenAI's first-party AI hardware systems, working across hardware security, embedded security, system security, and practical deployment at data center scale. You will partner with silicon, hardware, firmware, infrastructure, manufacturing, operations, and security teams to define and deliver system-level device trust. This includes boot integrity, device identity, provisioning, attestation, management-plane security, storage encryption, debug controls, firmware update and recovery, RMA, and decommissioning. You will be accountable for turning threat models into requirements, requirements into implementation, and implementation into validation evidence that can support launch decisions.

Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid: 3 days/week onsite) Relocation assistance available.

In this role, you will:

• Own security requirements, threat models, validation strategy, and launch-readiness evidence for first-party hardware platforms from early design through production deployment.
• Design and review secure boot, measured boot, roots of trust, platform firmware resilience, firmware signing, recovery, and anti-rollback strategies across heterogeneous devices.
• Own device identity, provisioning, enrollment, attestation, certificate lifecycle, and key-management requirements across manufacturing and data center bring-up.
• Harden management