About this role.
OpenAI is hiring a Software Engineer focused on security observability infrastructure within its Security team. The role builds scalable systems and data pipelines that centralize security-relevant data, improve resilience, and support detection, forensic investigations, and compliance. It requires strong software engineering capability, particularly in Python or Go, cloud infrastructure, Terraform, Azure, and security-oriented data engineering. The engineer will partner closely with Detection & Response and other technical teams while working across databases, SRE, and security domains. The position supports remote work in the United States or relocation to San Francisco, Seattle, or New York City, and requires U.S. citizenship.
Role DNA
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5/5Pace & Pressure
4/5Autonomy Level
4/5Communication Load
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Core skills
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Cover letter sample
Dear Hiring Team,
I am excited to apply for the Software Engineer, Security Observability role at OpenAI. My background in building reliable software systems, security-focused data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure aligns closely with the team’s need to improve security visibility, detection capabilities, and forensic readiness.
I would bring a practical, collaborative approach to developing scalable services with tools such as Python or Go, Terraform, and cloud platforms, while partnering effectively with security, detection, and engineering stakeholders. I am especially motivated by the opportunity to contribute to resilient security infrastructure that supports OpenAI’s mission to deploy AI safely and responsibly.
Thank you for your consideration. I would welcome the opportunity to discuss how my engineering and security experience can contribute to OpenAI’s Security team.
Sample interview questions
I would begin by defining event schemas, source ownership, expected volume, latency requirements, retention, and access controls. I would use decoupled ingestion and processing layers with durable buffering, schema validation, enrichment, monitoring, and dead-letter handling. The storage design would support both fast investigation queries and economical long-term retention, with encryption, least-privilege access, and auditable data handling throughout.
I would establish service-level objectives for ingestion completeness, freshness, durability, and query availability, then instrument the pipeline to measure them. I would address failure modes through retries with backoff, idempotent processing, replay capability, capacity testing, multi-zone resilience, and clear runbooks. I would also add alerts for missing sources, abnormal event-volume changes, processing lag, and schema failures.
I treat infrastructure code as production software: version control, peer review, automated validation, policy checks, and controlled deployments are essential. I would use Terraform modules with secure defaults, segregated environments, remote state protection, least-privilege cloud roles, and secrets managed outside code. Changes should be traceable, reversible, and continuously assessed for configuration drift.
I would meet with detection engineers and responders to understand investigation workflows, existing blind spots, data-quality issues, and detection priorities. I would convert those needs into concrete telemetry, normalization, enrichment, and retention requirements, then validate the results through realistic investigation and detection exercises. Ongoing feedback loops and measurable outcomes, such as reduced time to triage or improved coverage, would guide iteration.
A strong approach is to clarify shared reliability and security goals, identify the highest-risk dependencies, and create an incremental plan that each team can support. I would communicate tradeoffs clearly, use operational metrics to prioritize work, and ensure that ownership, escalation paths, and documentation are established before launch. This creates durable systems rather than one-time fixes while respecting each discipline’s requirements.
About the Team
Security is at the foundation of OpenAI’s mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
The Security team protects OpenAI’s technology, people, and products. We are technical in what we build but are operational in how we do our work, and are committed to supporting all products and research at OpenAI. Our Security team tenets include: prioritizing for impact, enabling researchers, preparing for future transformative technologies, and engaging a robust security culture.
About the Role
We are seeking a Software Engineer, Security Observability to join our Security team. In this role, you will be responsible for building secure, scalable systems that enhance our security observability infrastructure. Leveraging your strong engineering skills, you will collaborate with cross-functional teams to develop, deploy, and maintain robust software solutions that support our security and detection capabilities.
This role is open to remote employees, or relocation assistance is available to one of our OpenAI offices in San Francisco, Seattle, or New York City.
Due to requirements associated with work this role may support, applicants for this position must be U.S. citizens.
In this role, you will:
Design and develop scalable software systems that facilitate security observability across our infrastructure.
Build and maintain data pipelines that centralize and store security-relevant data from diverse sources.
Proactively improve the resilience and reliability of data systems to ensure high platform availability
Collaborate closely with Detection & Response (D&R) and other security teams to reduce the company’s security risk.
Contribute to data engineering in support of forensic investigations and compliance efforts.
You might thrive in this role if you have:
Strong software engineering experience, with proficiency in programming languages such as Python, Golang, or similar.
A background in infrastructure as code, with experience using tools like Terraform and working with cloud platforms such as Azure.
Experience with building and maintaining data pipelines, particularly for security-related use cases.
A generalist engineering mindset, with the flexibility to pivot between various technical domains such as databases, site reliability engineering (SRE), or security.
The ability to collaborate effectively with security and engineering teams to understand evolving data needs and implement scalable solutions.
A proactive and detail-oriented approach to problem-solving, with a focus on improving security data visibility and forensic capabilities.
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-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
To 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.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
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