Systems Software Engineer, Security, First Party Hardware

The role

You will own the end-to-end security foundation for first-party AI hardware systems. This involves working across hardware, embedded, and system security to deliver device trust for OpenAI's supercomputing platform.

What you will do

• Own security requirements, threat models, validation strategy, and launch-readiness evidence.
• Design and review secure boot, measured boot, roots of trust, and firmware resilience.
• Own device identity, provisioning, enrollment, attestation, and certificate lifecycle.
• Harden management interfaces and operational access paths across BMCs, hosts, and accelerators.
• Drive security requirements for manufacturing, supply chain, and decommissioning processes.
• Build and drive validation for security-critical hardware and firmware behavior.
• Partner with vendors and contract manufacturers to deliver security requirements.
• Drive end-to-end closure across design, implementation, and deployment.
• Investigate hardware and firmware security issues and drive durable fixes.

Required qualifications

• 7+ years of hands-on experience, or exceptional accomplishments demonstrating equivalent expertise, in hardware security, embedded security, firmware security, platform security, or low-level systems
• Experience shipping or securing real hardware platforms, embedded devices, servers, accelerators, networking systems, BMCs, bootloaders, BIOS/UEFI, RTOS, kernels, or firmware update systems.
• Deep familiarity with secure boot, measured boot, TPMs, hardware roots of trust, device attestation, key provisioning, debug interfaces, firmware signing, recovery, or lifecycle-state design.
• Strong applied-cryptography judgment for secure boot, attestation, TLS/mTLS, key storage, certificate lifecycle, storage encryption, and post-quantum readiness.
• Ability to read and write systems code in C, C++, or Rust.
• Comfort with hardware-software interfaces such as SPI, I2C, SMBus, PCIe, UART, JTAG, SWD, GPIOs, TPMs, and board-level debug tools.
• Proven track record driving security improvements with hardware, firmware, infrastructure, manufacturing, operations, and partner teams.
• Experience owning broad, ambiguous security programs end to end.
• Clear written and verbal communication.

Benefits

• Relocation assistance available

Before you apply

• Candidates may need to meet certain legal status requirements to comply with U.S. export control laws and regulations.
• Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law.

About the company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.