This listing pays about $455,500 a year. Across 104 open principal software engineer listings that state pay, the middle half runs $210,500 to $320,000 and the median is $279,000. That is 63% above the median, above the middle half of those listings.

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Among software developers, AI is already used for some of the tasks. Measured exposure for software developers: 29% (some).

Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.

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About the job

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 operational in how we execute, and we support every product and research effort at OpenAI. Our tenets include prioritizing for impact, enabling researchers and developers, preparing for future transformative technologies, and fostering a strong, collaborative security culture.

About the Role

OpenAI is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join the Infrastructure Security (InfraSec) team. InfraSec safeguards the core of OpenAI’s research and production environments: GPU supercomputing clusters, multi-cloud infrastructure, datacenters, networking, storage, and the critical services that power our frontier AI models. Our charter spans everything from bare-metal hardware and firmware to Kubernetes clusters, service meshes, and the data pathways that carry highly sensitive model weights and user data.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will set technical direction and drive execution of critical foundational services, such as authentication systems, egress/ingress proxies, access brokers, and key management platforms, that demand high standards of reliability, scalability, and software craftsmanship. These systems form the security backbone of OpenAI’s customer and supercomputing environment and must remain robust under intense scale and adversarial pressure.

In this role, you will:

- Own the architecture and roadmap for one or more core security services (e.g., authN/Z, policy enforcement, secure proxies, key management), taking them from design to rollout to long-term operation.

- Design and implement planet-scale security systems that provide strong guarantees across hardware, operating systems, Kubernetes, networks, and CI/CD: balancing security, reliability, latency, and developer ergonomics.

- Lead cross-functional launches with infrastructure and research engineering teams, shaping interfaces, migration plans, and safe rollout strategies across large fleets and critical workflows.

- Build or evolve security primitives (identity, attestation, authorization, encryption key lifecycle, access mediation) that become platform building blocks for OpenAI.

- Leverage frontier models and agents to develop automation and detection tooling to continuously identify and mitigate risks in large-scale cloud and on-prem environments.

- Lead design reviews and threat models for major initiatives, and drive closure on systemic issues.

- Mentor engineers across InfraSec and partner teams, raising the bar on engineering quality, operational readiness, and secure-by-default practices.

You will thrive in this role if you have:

- Strong software engineering skills with a track record of shipping and operating reliable distributed systems in production.

- Experience building or operating critical infrastructure, especially security infrastructure, at planet scale (e.g., auth services, service-to-service proxies, certificate or key-management systems).

- Deep understanding of security principles, best practices, and common vulnerabilities.

- Demonstrated ability to lead cross-team technical initiatives: setting direction, aligning stakeholders, driving execution, and delivering measurable outcomes.

- Expertise and curiosity about using frontier models and agents to effectively solve security challenges.

- Expertise in securing large-scale cloud platforms (e.g., Azure, AWS, GCP), including multi-cloud networks and cloud-agnostic system design.

- A proactive mindset, with the ability to identify and address security gaps or inefficiencies through automation and tooling.

- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with an ability to think critically and objectively assess risks.

- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to convey complex security concepts to executive, technical, and non-technical stakeholders.

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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.

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 https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA. 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 https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf

At 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.