---
title: 'Engineering Manager, Identity & Access Platform at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-manager-identity-access-platform-openai-san-francisco-sepqa44ypc41'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Engineering Manager, Identity & Access Platform at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $347k–$510k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-06-22
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/5839b9a2-7d92-452a-8b56-06f8c3f97b75/application

**Skills:** Cloud Infrastructure, IAM, Authentication, Authorization, Workload Identity, Privileged Access, Policy Enforcement, Infrastructure-as-Code, Identity Infrastructure

> Lead the Identity Infrastructure Engineering team to build and scale secure access management systems for OpenAI's research and internal platforms. Define strategy for identity platforms, manage access policies, and ensure reliable, auditable, and least-privileged access across cloud environments.

## Job description

## About the Team

Security is at the foundation of OpenAI's mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Identity Infrastructure Engineering team sits at the core of this effort, designing and building the identity and access management solutions that protect model weights, customer data, and critical systems across multiple cloud environments. The team partners across OpenAI, including Applied Engineering, Research, IT, Security, Infrastructure, and Engineering, to provide secure and scalable platforms for identity, access management, permissioning, orchestration, and safe AI research.

## About the Role

We’re looking for an engineering leader to lead Identity Infrastructure Engineering, the team building the systems that govern and scale access across OpenAI’s research, engineering, and internal platforms. This role sits at the center of cloud infrastructure, identity, software engineering, and security-critical operations. You’ll lead engineers building control planes, policy systems, workload and agent authorization patterns, infrastructure-as-code, and operational foundations that help OpenAI move quickly while keeping access reliable, auditable, least-privileged, and safe under failure. The ideal candidate has led teams responsible for large-scale, mission-critical infrastructure. They can go deep into code and architecture when needed, while giving engineers and technical leads the clarity and ownership to do their best work. They set technical direction, grow strong teams, make durable architecture decisions, and turn ambiguous 0-to-1 problems into platforms OpenAI can trust and build on for years.

In this role, you will:

- Build and lead a high-performing Identity Infrastructure team, going deep enough technically to set direction while empowering the team to own delivery.
- Define the strategy for identity platform as the policy plane for access across people, agents, workloads, services, clouds, and internal systems.
- Scale Access Manager for evolving human and agent lifecycles, making routine access automatic and sensitive access contextual, time-bound, and accountable.
- Build the access graph and resource catalog that make access decisions explainable, risk-aware, and grounded in ownership, sensitivity, environment, and usage.
- Replace broad standing privilege with risk-tiered access, so routine work stays fast, privileged access is narrow and observable, and break-glass is exceptional.
- Establish first-class authorization for agents and workloads, with delegated, action-scoped permissions, time-bound access, full attribution, and no credential sharing.
- Partner across Security, Infrastructure, Applied, Research, IT, and product to turn identity standards into systems teams trust and adopt.
- Operate identity infrastructure as a mission-critical platform, with clear reliability goals, safe rollouts, strong observability, healthy on-call, and rigorous incident learning.
- Measure success by safer, faster, and more accountable access: reduced unnecessary privilege, stronger governance, broader coverage, clearer auditability, and less friction for legitimate work.

You might thrive in this role if you:

- Have 10+ years building and developing engineering teams that own large scale platforms.
- Experience owning security critical production systems where reliability, least privilege, auditability, and operational rigor are essential.
- Deep judgment across cloud infrastructure, IAM, authentication, authorization, workload identity, privileged access, and policy enforcement.
- Hands-on technical depth to go into code and architecture, pressure-test designs, and guide tradeoffs across correctness, performance, scale, and operability.
- Track record turning complex infrastructure problems into adopted platforms across Engineering, Security, Research, and internal teams.
- High bar for engineering quality, operational discipline, and long-term ownership.

## 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.

## About OpenAI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.
- **Entity Type**: Private – structured as a nonprofit parent (OpenAI Foundation) governing a for-profit public benefit corporation (OpenAI Group). The company has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, signaling a potential future IPO.
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and others

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence research and deployment
- **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises via API and platform), B2C (ChatGPT users), and developers (API, open-source models)
- **Mission**: To ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity.

## Products & Services
- **[ChatGPT](https://openai.com/chatgpt)**: Conversational AI assistant available via web and mobile, used by consumers and integrated into enterprise workflows.
- **[GPT-4 API](https://openai.com/product)**: Large language model accessed via API for developers to build AI-powered applications (text generation, summarization, code assistance, etc.).
- **[DALL-E](https://openai.com/dall-e-3)**: Image generation model that creates images from natural language descriptions.
- **[Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper)**: Open-source speech recognition system.
- **[OpenAI Agents](https://openai.com/)**: Emerging product category focused on autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks on behalf of users (announced June 2026).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed in the provided sources. Widely reported in the press at ~$300 billion as of early 2026 (post-funding round), but this figure is not confirmed by OpenAI’s official materials.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding exceeds $13 billion from Microsoft and other investors. The company has also confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC (see [openai.com](https://openai.com/) – “Confidential submission of draft S-1”).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Microsoft (strategic partner and largest investor), with additional participation from Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others.
- **Growth Signals**: Active hiring with 721 open roles posted; expansion into agent-based products; confidential IPO filing; continued deployment of frontier models.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover & brand recognition**: ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, establishing OpenAI as the household name in generative AI.
- **Research leadership**: Consistently publishes cutting-edge research (GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Whisper, etc.) and attracts top AI talent.
- **Compute & infrastructure**: Exclusive partnership with Microsoft provides massive cloud computing resources (Azure) for training and inference.
- **Unique governance structure**: The nonprofit parent ensures mission alignment (AGI benefiting humanity) while the for-profit arm can raise capital and scale products.

## Strategic Focus
- **Safe AGI development**: Continued emphasis on safety research, alignment, and responsible deployment (e.g., safety systems, model provenance).
- **Enterprise expansion**: Growing ChatGPT Enterprise and API offerings for businesses.
- **Agentic AI**: Building autonomous agents that can “transform work” (announced June 2026).
- **IPO preparation**: Confidential S-1 filing indicates intent to go public, which will require increased financial transparency and governance maturity.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & values**: OpenAI’s stated values include “Humanity first,” “Act with humility,” “Feel the AGI,” and “Ship joy.” Operating principles emphasize agency, creativity, rapid iteration, and intense focus.
- **Benefits**: Competitive health insurance, mental healthcare support, 24-week paid birth-parent leave (plus 20 weeks for other parents), generous PTO, annual learning & development stipend, daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), and a domestic conference budget.
- **Work environment**: Hybrid/office-based (San Francisco headquarters). The company offers a residency program for researchers and engineers transitioning into AI.
- **Impact**: Employees work directly on frontier AI models that shape the industry and society. The mission-driven nature attracts talent passionate about AGI’s societal implications.

## Sources
1. [OpenAI About Page](https://openai.com/about/)
2. [OpenAI Careers Page](https://openai.com/careers/)
3. [OpenAI Job Search](https://openai.com/careers/search)
4. [OpenAI Homepage](https://openai.com/)

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