Principal Software Engineer, Identity

About the Team

The Enterprise Identity team builds the identity foundation that enables organizations to adopt and use OpenAI products securely and reliably. The team owns the enterprise identity stack, including SSO, SCIM, tenant architecture, and identity capabilities across the enterprise admin experience and OpenAI's growing multi-product portfolio.

About the Role

We are looking for a hands-on senior technical leader to own the architecture and evolution of OpenAI's Enterprise Identity systems. You will set the long-term technical vision for the entire stack, establish shared identity primitives across products, and be accountable for systems that are foundational to our enterprise business.

This role requires operating well beyond a single service or feature area. You will identify the most consequential architectural investments, align teams around durable solutions, and ensure our identity platform meets an exceptionally high bar for scale, availability, latency, and security.

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

In this role, you will:

• Own the technical vision and architecture for the Enterprise Identity stack, including SSO, SCIM, tenant architecture, groups, permissions, and identity capabilities in enterprise administration surfaces.

• Lead the design and evolution of highly available, latency-sensitive identity systems serving a large and diverse global enterprise customer base.

• Establish common identity models and primitives that work consistently across OpenAI's products and enable the organization to scale.

• Set a high security bar by anticipating abuse cases, failure modes, and the long-term implications of new capabilities.

• Drive alignment across enterprise product, infrastructure, and security partners, resolving ambiguity and influencing roadmaps beyond the immediate team.

• Provide technical leadership to senior engineers and raise the quality of architecture and execution across the broader organization.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• 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.

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.

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