---
title: 'Engineering Manager, Identity Platform at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-manager-identity-platform-openai-san-francisco-902hb54znqkf'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-15'
---

# Engineering Manager, Identity Platform at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-08
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-15
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/7ba0b390-b198-4101-80bb-b49a6dd62607

## Job description

## About the Team

Identity is the foundation of trust in an AI-powered world. As people build a rich personal and organizational context in ChatGPT, they need systems that protect it, remember it, and let them share it securely across apps and agents. Without strong identity, context stays locked away or exposed. With it, AI becomes safe, personal, and truly useful, empowering users while keeping control firmly in their hands. Our team builds the trusted OpenAI account layer that connects people, enterprises, developers, and agents to OpenAI apps and the broader AI ecosystem. Our systems are the front door to OpenAI—held to an exceptionally high bar for availability, security, and latency—and are depended on by many internal teams.

## About the Role

As an Engineering Manager, Identity Platform you will lead a team owning foundational identity services that must be highly reliable, secure, and fast under extreme load. You’ll set direction, grow and support the team, and partner closely across engineering and security to strengthen the platform that enables trusted access to OpenAI products. In this role, you will:

- Build, lead, and develop a high-performing engineering team. Coach and mentor engineers and senior technical leads to increase their impact and support their growth.
- Define and own the technical strategy, roadmap, and execution for OpenAI’s core identity systems.
- Guide the architecture of distributed systems operating at massive scale, with high requirements for reliability, privacy, and performance.
- Partner closely with Product and Infrastructure teams to support new product needs and uphold high system standards.
- Ensure the team operates effectively, maintains strong engineering rigor, and consistently delivers against ambitious goals.
- Establish processes and a culture that enable fast learning, high trust, and responsible innovation.
- Lead the team responsible for the authentication stack and token exchange infrastructure, ensuring high availability, strong security posture, and low-latency performance.
- Own and improve request validation at the edge for logged-in users, delivering extremely high reliability and fast validation under high throughput.
- Oversee systems that enable secure access to user data, improving scalability, reliability, and access patterns for internal consumers across the company.

You might thrive in this role if you:

- Have 10+ years of experience building, scaling, and operating distributed systems at large scale.
- Have 3+ years of experience managing high-performance engineering teams in fast-paced, rapidly shifting environments.
- Care deeply about people leadership, coaching, and helping engineers achieve peak performance.
- Communicate clearly, think holistically, and make decisions grounded in both user needs and long-term sustainability.
- Have experience managing an infrastructure team and are effective at hiring, coaching, and developing engineers while maintaining strong operational excellence.
- Have deep experience building and operating high-scale backend systems, with a track record of improving reliability, latency, and security in production.
- Bring broad infrastructure expertise across the stack—from hardware and cluster management to services and storage layers.

## 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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