Engineering Manager, Identity Platform

Engineering Manager · Manager · Full Time

San FranciscoUSD 293k – 385k3w ago
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Role

What you'll do.

Lead a high-performing engineering team building OpenAI's foundational identity platform—a critical authentication and access control layer serving millions of users and internal teams. This role requires deep expertise in distributed systems operating at massive scale, combined with strong people leadership skills to mentor senior engineers and drive both technical strategy and operational excellence in a fast-paced AI-powered environment.

Responsibilities

  • Team Leadership and Development: Build, lead, and develop a high-performing engineering team while coaching and mentoring senior technical leads. Focus on increasing engineer impact, supporting career growth, and creating an environment of continuous learning. Establish performance expectations, conduct regular one-on-ones, and develop succession plans within the team.
  • Technical Strategy and Roadmap Ownership: Define and own the technical strategy, roadmap, and execution for OpenAI's core identity systems. Align technical direction with product vision and company priorities while ensuring the roadmap remains flexible to respond to emerging security threats and infrastructure challenges.
  • Distributed Systems Architecture: Guide the architecture of distributed systems operating at massive scale with stringent requirements for reliability, privacy, and performance. Collaborate on design decisions for authentication stack and token exchange infrastructure, ensuring systems can handle extreme load while maintaining sub-millisecond latency.
  • Cross-Functional Partnership: Partner closely with Product, Infrastructure, Security, and other engineering teams to support new product needs and maintain high system standards. Act as a technical liaison between teams, ensuring identity platform capabilities align with organizational priorities.
  • Operational Excellence and Execution: Ensure the team operates effectively, maintains strong engineering rigor, and consistently delivers against ambitious goals. Establish processes for code review, testing, deployment, and incident response. Monitor system health metrics and drive continuous improvement initiatives.
  • Culture and Innovation Leadership: Establish processes and foster a culture that enables fast learning, high trust, and responsible innovation. Balance speed of development with security and reliability requirements. Champion best practices in security and infrastructure design across the team.
  • Authentication Infrastructure Management: Lead the team responsible for the authentication stack and token exchange infrastructure, ensuring high availability, strong security posture, and low-latency performance. Oversee incident response for authentication failures and lead post-mortems to prevent recurrence.
  • Edge Request Validation: Own and improve request validation at the edge for logged-in users, delivering extremely high reliability and fast validation under high throughput. Optimize validation logic to minimize latency while maximizing security checks.
  • User Data Access Systems: Oversee systems that enable secure access to user data across the organization. Improve scalability, reliability, and access patterns for internal consumers. Ensure proper authorization controls and audit logging for sensitive data access.

Qualifications

What we look for.

Technical

  • Distributed Systems Design

    Expert-level knowledge of distributed systems concepts including consensus algorithms, replication strategies, consistency models, and fault tolerance patterns. Experience with systems handling billions of transactions.

  • Authentication and Identity Systems

    Deep expertise in building authentication systems, OAuth/OIDC protocols, token management, session handling, and identity federation. Understanding of cryptographic principles and security best practices in identity systems.

  • Backend Infrastructure

    Broad expertise across the infrastructure stack from hardware and cluster management to services and storage layers. Experience with container orchestration, load balancing, database systems, and observability platforms.

  • High-Performance Systems

    Experience optimizing systems for latency, throughput, and resource efficiency. Knowledge of profiling tools, bottleneck identification, and performance optimization techniques in production environments.

  • Security and Reliability

    Strong understanding of security architecture, threat modeling, access control systems, and incident response procedures. Experience improving system reliability through redundancy, monitoring, and automated failover mechanisms.

Education

  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related Field

    Undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical discipline. Equivalent professional experience may be considered in place of formal degree.

Experience

  • Distributed Systems at Scale

    10+ years of experience building, scaling, and operating distributed systems at large scale. Demonstrated track record of handling systems processing millions of requests per second with strong reliability and security requirements.

  • Engineering Team Management

    3+ years of experience managing high-performance engineering teams in fast-paced, rapidly shifting environments. Proven ability to hire, develop, and retain top engineering talent while maintaining operational excellence and delivery velocity.

  • Infrastructure Team Leadership

    Experience managing infrastructure teams with demonstrated effectiveness at hiring, coaching, and developing engineers. Track record of building and maintaining systems with exceptional uptime and performance metrics.

  • High-Scale Backend Systems

    Deep experience building and operating high-scale backend systems with a track record of improving reliability, latency, and security in production environments. Experience owning systems that serve as critical dependencies for other teams.

  • People Leadership and Coaching

    Demonstrated passion for people leadership, coaching, and helping engineers achieve peak performance. Experience developing junior engineers into senior technical leaders and creating high-trust team environments.

Skills

Required

  • Technical Leadership

    Ability to set technical direction, make architecture decisions, and guide teams through complex engineering challenges. Comfort making trade-offs between speed, reliability, and security.

  • People Management

    Strong interpersonal skills with ability to coach, mentor, and develop engineers. Capable of having difficult conversations, providing feedback, and supporting career development.

  • System Design Expertise

    Deep understanding of distributed systems design patterns, scalability challenges, and reliability engineering. Ability to evaluate and improve existing systems.

  • Communication and Decision-Making

    Clear communication across technical and non-technical stakeholders. Ability to think holistically, balance competing priorities, and make decisions grounded in user needs and long-term sustainability.

  • Operational Excellence

    Commitment to maintaining high engineering standards, strong code quality, comprehensive testing, and rigorous deployment processes. Experience establishing team processes and best practices.

Preferred

  • AI/ML Infrastructure Experience

    Nice to have

    Experience building infrastructure to support AI/ML workloads or working at AI-focused companies. Understanding of the unique infrastructure challenges in modern AI systems.

  • Security Engineering Background

    Nice to have

    Background in security engineering or direct collaboration with security teams. Understanding of threat models and security-first system design principles.

  • Large-Scale Platform Experience

    Nice to have

    Experience building platforms that serve as critical infrastructure for other teams or products. Understanding of platform reliability requirements and multi-tenant system design.

  • Open Source Contributions

    Nice to have

    Active participation in open source projects related to distributed systems, databases, or infrastructure tools. Public examples of technical contributions and community involvement.

  • Crisis Management and Incident Response

    Nice to have

    Experience leading teams through production incidents, managing escalations, and implementing post-incident improvements. Comfort working under pressure during critical outages.

Tech stack

Languages

PythonGoRustTypeScript

Frameworks

FastAPI or FlaskgRPCKubernetesOpenTelemetry

Databases

PostgreSQLRedisDynamoDB or similarElasticsearch

Tools

TerraformPrometheus and GrafanaELK Stack or DatadogArgoCD or similarPagerDuty

Other

AWS, GCP, or AzureOAuth 2.0 and OpenID ConnectJWT and CryptographyLoad Balancing and Traffic Management

Compensation

Pay and benefits.

Base·USD 293,000 – 385,000

Equity·Stock options

Benefits

  • Equity Compensation

    Competitive stock options package aligned with company performance and providing long-term upside as OpenAI scales its AI capabilities and product offerings.

  • Health and Wellness

    Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage. Mental health support services, gym reimbursement, and wellness programs supporting work-life balance.

  • Professional Development

    Learning budget for conferences, courses, and technical certifications. Access to internal technical talks and collaboration with leading AI researchers.

  • Flexible Work Environment

    Flexible work arrangements supporting remote and in-office work. San Francisco headquarters with modern facilities for collaboration and innovation.

  • Time Off and Sabbatical

    Generous vacation policy, paid time off, and sabbatical programs supporting sustained high performance and burnout prevention.

  • Retirement Planning

    401(k) plan with employer matching to support long-term financial security and retirement planning.

Process

Interview steps.

  1. 01

    Initial Screening Call

    Conversation with recruiting team to discuss your background, motivation for joining OpenAI, and alignment with the Engineering Manager role. Focus on your experience with distributed systems and team leadership.

  2. 02

    Technical Leadership Discussion

    Deep dive with current team members or peer managers on your technical expertise. Expect questions about distributed systems design, specific projects you've led, and how you approach architectural decisions at scale.

  3. 03

    System Design Interview

    Collaborative design session where you'll architect a distributed system addressing identity and authentication challenges. You'll work through trade-offs, scalability concerns, and security considerations similar to real platform challenges.

  4. 04

    People Leadership Interview

    Discussion with OpenAI's leadership or HR partners focused on your management philosophy, team development experience, and approach to hiring and retention. Expect scenarios around coaching, performance management, and scaling teams.

  5. 05

    Cross-Functional Partnership Conversation

    Meeting with stakeholders from Product, Infrastructure, or Security teams to assess your collaboration style. Discuss how you balance team autonomy with organizational priorities and manage competing demands.

  6. 06

    Executive Leadership Round

    Final conversation with director-level or executive leadership covering strategic vision for the identity platform, your leadership style, and cultural fit with OpenAI's mission to ensure AI benefits humanity.

Full posting

Original listing.

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.

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. 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.

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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.

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