Senior Staff Software Engineer, Identity

About the role

You will own the long-term technical vision and architecture for OpenAI's Enterprise Identity stack, shaping how the organization adopts and uses products securely. This role demands that you establish shared identity primitives and durable architectural patterns that scale across an expanding portfolio of products and customers. You will set an exceptionally high bar for security, availability, and latency while anticipating abuse cases and failure modes at every layer. Operating beyond a single service, you will identify the most consequential investments and ensure that identity becomes a durable competitive advantage for the business. You will align cross-functional partners and resolve ambiguity to keep roadmaps consistent with enterprise needs and regulatory expectations. Your work will directly underpin the trust and reliability that large global enterprises require when integrating OpenAI into their critical workflows. You will mentor senior engineers and elevate the quality of architecture and execution across the broader identity organization.

Key facts

What you'll do

Define and evolve the architectural blueprint for the Enterprise Identity stack, including SSO, SCIM, tenant architecture, groups, permissions, and identity primitives embedded in enterprise administration surfaces.

Design and operate latency-sensitive, highly available identity systems that serve a large and diverse global enterprise customer base with strict reliability and security requirements.

Establish common identity models and primitives that remain consistent across OpenAI's products and services, enabling seamless scaling of authentication, authorization, and tenant management.

Set a rigorous security posture by proactively analyzing abuse cases, failure modes, and the long-term implications of new identity capabilities before they reach production.

Drive alignment among enterprise product, infrastructure, and security partners, resolving complex tradeoffs and influencing roadmaps beyond the immediate team.

Provide hands-on technical leadership to senior engineers, elevating the quality of code, design reviews, and delivery practices across the identity organization.

Own the design and evolution of tenant architectures, ensuring isolation, scalability, and operational simplicity for large customers with complex requirements.

Collaborate with product and security teams to embed identity capabilities deeply into enterprise admin experiences and multi-product workflows.

Evaluate emerging standards and patterns in identity, translating them into durable platform decisions that balance innovation with stability and compliance.

Champion measurable outcomes for uptime, performance, and security, establishing observability and feedback loops to guide continuous improvement.

Guide the implementation of identity primitives such as permissions, roles, and group management to support sophisticated enterprise use cases.

Partner closely with infrastructure teams to ensure identity systems meet stringent demands around scalability, resilience, and efficient resource utilization.

Lead incident responses and postmortems for critical identity issues, driving improvements in robustness and preventing future occurrences.

Work closely with compliance and legal stakeholders to ensure identity solutions meet evolving regulatory and contractual obligations for enterprise customers.

Mentor and grow the next generation of engineers by providing clear technical direction, constructive feedback, and career development support.

Requirements

Have owned the architecture of a broad, business-critical platform or large-scale distributed-systems domain at the senior-staff level.

Have set multi-year technical direction and successfully aligned multiple teams around complex architectural decisions.

Understand enterprise identity, enterprise architecture, and the operational needs of large customers in multi-product environments.

Have experience with SSO, SCIM, identity providers, tenant models, permissions, groups, or adjacent identity infrastructure.

Bring a security-minded, adversarial approach to systems design and instinctively consider how capabilities could fail or be abused.

Can move between deep technical judgment, organizational influence, and hands-on leadership where it matters most.

Are comfortable designing systems that must be highly available, latency-sensitive, and correct under extreme operational conditions.

Have a track record of delivering robust, scalable infrastructure that supports mission-critical enterprise workloads over extended periods.

Nice to have

Experience contributing to open source identity protocols, standards, or widely adopted libraries in the identity space.

Background working in regulated industries where security, auditability, and compliance constraints are central to product decisions.

Practical notes

This role is based in our San Francisco or Mountain View office.

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.