Systems Software Engineer, Security, First Party Hardware

About the Team

OpenAI's Hardware organization develops silicon, systems, and platform infrastructure designed for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. The First-Party Hardware team works across accelerators, servers, racks, firmware, manufacturing, deployment, and operations to build AI-native compute systems for OpenAI's supercomputing infrastructure. Security is a foundational property of these systems, spanning how devices are designed, provisioned, enrolled, operated, serviced, and retired.

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 interfaces and operational access paths across BMCs, hosts, accelerators, switches, and service tooling, including TLS/mTLS, Redfish, gNMI, SSH, syslog, and break-glass workflows.

• Drive security requirements for manufacturing, supply chain, firmware/image signing, storage encryption, RMA, repair, and decommissioning processes.

• Build and drive validation for security-critical hardware and firmware behavior, including debug lockout, lifecycle transitions, update paths, attestation evidence, and recovery flows.

• Partner with vendors and contract manufacturers to turn security requirements into concrete deliverables, test evidence, and launch gates.

• Drive end-to-end closure across design, implementation, manufacturing readiness, deployment readiness, fleet operations, and incident response when security issues arise.

• Investigate hardware and firmware security issues, assess exploitability and operational risk, and drive durable fixes with engineering owners.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 7+ years of hands-on experience, or exceptional accomplishments demonstrating equivalent expertise, in hardware security, embedded security, firmware security, platform security, or low-level systems security.

• Experience shipping or securing real hardware platforms, embedded devices, servers, accelerators, networking systems, BMCs, bootloaders, BIOS/UEFI, RTOS, kernels, or firmware update systems.

• Deep familiarity with secure boot, measured boot, TPMs, hardware roots of trust, device attestation, key provisioning, debug interfaces, firmware signing, recovery, or lifecycle-state design.

• Strong applied-cryptography judgment for secure boot, attestation, TLS/mTLS, key storage, certificate lifecycle, storage encryption, and long-range transitions such as post-quantum readiness.

• Ability to read and write systems code in C, C++, or Rust and to use that skill to review, prototype, test, or debug security-critical behavior.

• Comfort with hardware-software interfaces such as SPI, I2C, SMBus, PCIe, UART, JTAG, SWD, GPIOs, TPMs, and board-level debug tools.

• Proven track record driving security improvements with hardware, firmware, infrastructure, manufacturing, operations, and partner teams.

• Experience owning broad, ambiguous security programs end to end, including translating risk into technical requirements, validation plans, and accountable engineering decisions.

• Clear written and verbal communication, with the ability to turn ambiguous security risks into actionable requirements, design reviews, tests, and decisions.

To comply with U.S. export control laws and regulations, candidates for this role may need to meet certain legal status requirements as provided in those laws and regulations.

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. 

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.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

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, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. 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: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-pub