{"id":65617,"url":"https://alion.io/job/openai-systems-software-engineer-security-first-party-hardware","title":"Systems Software Engineer, Security, First Party Hardware","company":{"id":2,"name":"OpenAI","domain":"openai.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/openai","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":78,"open_postings":191,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.874,"repost_share":0.005,"time_to_fill_p50_days":52,"computed_at":"2026-10-25T05:49:26Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":230000,"max":385000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":385000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false},{"name":"RTOS","optional":false},{"name":"Rust","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-06-08T23:42:40Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-06-08","last_verified_at":"2026-10-25T20:28:04Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":138,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":138},"description":"About the Team\nOpenAI’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.\nAbout the Role\nWe'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.\nYou 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.\nLocation: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid: 3 days/week onsite)\nRelocation assistance available.\nIn this role, you will:\nOwn security requirements, threat models, validation strategy, and launch-readiness evidence for first-party hardware platforms from early design through production deployment.\n\nDesign and review secure boot, measured boot, roots of trust, platform firmware resilience, firmware signing, recovery, and anti-rollback strategies across heterogeneous devices.\n\nOwn device identity, provisioning, enrollment, attestation, certificate lifecycle, and key-management requirements across manufacturing and data center bring-up.\n\nHarden 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.\n\nDrive security requirements for manufacturing, supply chain, firmware/image signing, storage encryption, RMA, repair, and decommissioning processes.\n\nBuild and drive validation for security-critical hardware and firmware behavior, including debug lockout, lifecycle transitions, update paths, attestation evidence, and recovery flows.\n\nPartner with vendors and contract manufacturers to turn security requirements into concrete deliverables, test evidence, and launch gates.\n\nDrive end-to-end closure across design, implementation, manufacturing readiness, deployment readiness, fleet operations, and incident response when security issues arise.\n\nInvestigate hardware and firmware security issues, assess exploitability and operational risk, and drive durable fixes with engineering owners.\n\nYou might thrive in this role if you have:\n7+ 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.\n\nExperience shipping or securing real hardware platforms, embedded devices, servers, accelerators, networking systems, BMCs, bootloaders, BIOS/UEFI, RTOS, kernels, or firmware update systems.\n\nDeep familiarity with secure boot, measured boot, TPMs, hardware roots of trust, device attestation, key provisioning, debug interfaces, firmware signing, recovery, or lifecycle-state design.\n\nStrong applied-cryptography judgment for secure boot, attestation, TLS/mTLS, key storage, certificate lifecycle, storage encryption, and long-range transitions such as post-quantum readiness.\n\nAbility 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.\n\nComfort with hardware-software interfaces such as SPI, I2C, SMBus, PCIe, UART, JTAG, SWD, GPIOs, TPMs, and board-level debug tools.\n\nProven track record driving security improvements with hardware, firmware, infrastructure, manufacturing, operations, and partner teams.\n\nExperience owning broad, ambiguous security programs end to end, including translating risk into technical requirements, validation plans, and accountable engineering decisions.\n\nClear written and verbal communication, with the ability to turn ambiguous security risks into actionable requirements, design reviews, tests, and decisions.\n\nTo 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.\nAbout OpenAI\nOpenAI 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.\nWe 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.\nFor additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.\nBackground 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-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.\nTo notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.\nWe are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.\nOpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy\nAt 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7272,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":7,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Relocation assistance"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Conversational AI","Generative Video","Code Intelligence"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-06-08T23:42:40Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 262 · green card filings: 3","filings_12m":262,"filings_prev_12m":114,"green_card_filings_12m":3,"median_offered_wage_usd":272217,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":127}],"liveness":{"score":11,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.403,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":138,"expected_fill_days":52,"reasons":["conf:0","stale_co","velocity","win:tail","crowd:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-25T05:49:26Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":385000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/openai-systems-software-engineer-security-first-party-hardware","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/openai-systems-software-engineer-security-first-party-hardware.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-25T20:57:38Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":29575,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-26T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":2},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=2"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fopenai-systems-software-engineer-security-first-party-hardware"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fopenai-systems-software-engineer-security-first-party-hardware"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fopenai-systems-software-engineer-security-first-party-hardware"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/openai-systems-software-engineer-security-first-party-hardware\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fopenai-systems-software-engineer-security-first-party-hardware"}]}