# Software Engineer, HSM Infrastructure Security, Consumer Devices
**Company:** [OpenAI](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/openai)
Design and implement hardware-backed security foundations for OpenAI's consumer device ecosystem as a Security Software Engineer specializing in HSM infrastructure. This hands-on role demands deep expertise in cryptographic systems, secure firmware development, and policy enforcement at hardware trust boundaries, requiring 5+ years building secure embedded systems and proficiency in C, C++, or Rust for production-level security software and firmware engineering.
**Role:** Security Engineer
**Seniority:** Senior
**Locations:** Seattle
**Salary:** 347000–445000 USD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/96475a30-5aa1-4c56-802d-fe8a54c9cbd9)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/openai/software-engineer-hsm-infrastructure-security-consumer-devices-96475a30
---
## Responsibilities

- Design and Implement Hardware-Backed Security Foundations: Architect and develop security-critical software and firmware for HSMs, secure elements, trusted execution environments, and hardware roots of trust that protect sensitive cryptographic keys and enforce security policies across OpenAI's consumer device ecosystem.
- Build and Harden Policy-to-HSM Boundaries: Construct and strengthen the security boundary between policy systems and HSMs, ensuring that operations are properly authorized, cryptographic signing is restricted to approved use cases, and policy modifications are subject to multi-party review and audit trails.
- Develop Cryptographic Interface Implementations: Implement and extend cryptographic interfaces including PKCS#11, OpenSSL providers/engines, and platform-native key-storage APIs that enable applications to securely use hardware-backed cryptographic services.
- Engineer Key Management and Lifecycle Systems: Build firmware and software components that cryptographically enforce key generation, secure provisioning, usage policies, scheduled rotation, recovery procedures, and secure destruction following industry standards and OpenAI's security requirements.
- Create HSM-Backed Certificate Authority Infrastructure: Design and implement certificate authority, code-signing, and device-identity systems backed by hardware security modules that provide trustworthy issuance, revocation, and lifecycle management of cryptographic credentials.
- Develop Device Attestation and Secure Boot Systems: Build security capabilities supporting device attestation, secure boot verification, factory provisioning workflows, secure restoration procedures, user registration, and authentication mechanisms using hardware-backed trust.
- Establish Verifiable Policy Control Mechanisms: Design and implement controls that make trusted software and policy changes verifiable, auditable, and subject to appropriate multi-party authorization, enabling secure governance of security-critical deployments.
- Conduct Embedded Software Security Review and Testing: Write, review, test, and audit secure embedded software for resource-constrained environments, identifying vulnerabilities and ensuring cryptographic operations maintain security properties under realistic conditions.
- Develop Security Validation Tooling: Create test harnesses, emulators, fuzzers, and fault-injection tooling to validate security properties, simulate failure scenarios, and ensure HSM systems behave securely under adverse conditions and edge cases.
- Perform Hardware-Software Threat Modeling: Analyze and threat-model hardware and software trust boundaries, identify attack surfaces and security gaps, and translate threat-modeling findings into concrete engineering improvements and mitigations.
- Drive Cross-Functional Security Integration: Partner with hardware, firmware, infrastructure, application, and product security teams to architect and integrate secure-by-default capabilities into production consumer devices and backend systems.
- Establish Security Engineering Standards: Help establish and enforce engineering standards, best practices, and security guidelines for HSM development, applied cryptography, secure key management, and certificate infrastructure across OpenAI's organization.

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related Field","description":"Preferred foundational education in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related discipline providing theoretical grounding in systems and security principles."}

### technical

- {"name":"HSM Trusted Application Development","description":"Ability to develop and deploy trusted applications that run within HSM execution environments, manage cryptographic state, enforce policy, and provide secure interfaces to host systems."}
- {"name":"Cryptographic Protocol Implementation","description":"Competency implementing end-to-end cryptographic protocols spanning devices, secure hardware, policy services, and backend infrastructure with correct operation under edge cases."}
- {"name":"Key Management Systems","description":"Design and implementation of HSM-backed key-management systems including key generation, secure provisioning, usage control, rotation, recovery, and destruction following cryptographic best practices."}
- {"name":"Certificate Authority Systems","description":"Building HSM-backed certificate authority infrastructure, code-signing systems, and device-identity frameworks that enforce policy through hardware-backed trust boundaries."}
- {"name":"Device Driver and Middleware Development","description":"Development of HSM device drivers, host libraries, SDKs, and middleware that abstract secure hardware capabilities and provide reliable interfaces to applications."}
- {"name":"Security Testing and Fuzzing","description":"Creating test harnesses, emulators, fuzzing frameworks, and fault-injection tooling to validate security properties, identify failure modes, and ensure robustness of cryptographic operations."}
- {"name":"Concurrency and Memory Safety","description":"Deep reasoning about concurrent systems, memory safety properties, privilege separation, hardware interfaces, and prevention of common vulnerabilities in secure systems."}

### experience

- {"name":"5+ Years Secure Embedded Firmware Development","description":"Minimum five years of professional experience designing and building secure embedded firmware for resource-constrained environments with production deployment experience and security-focused implementations."}
- {"name":"Production Systems Shipping Experience","description":"Demonstrated history of designing, implementing, debugging, and shipping complete production systems, from initial requirements through deployment with ongoing maintenance and support."}
- {"name":"Security-Critical Software Development","description":"Hands-on experience developing security-critical software or firmware within or directly adjacent to hardware trust boundaries including HSMs, secure elements, TEEs, or hardware roots of trust."}
- {"name":"Cross-Functional Hardware and Software Integration","description":"Experience working across hardware, firmware, backend infrastructure, and application teams to design and integrate secure-by-default capabilities into production consumer or enterprise systems."}

## Skills

### required

- {"name":"Hardware Security Module (HSM) Development","description":"Deep experience designing and implementing security-critical software and firmware within or immediately adjacent to HSM trust boundaries, including trusted applications, cryptographic mechanisms, and policy enforcement systems."}
- {"name":"Secure Embedded Firmware","description":"5+ years building secure embedded firmware for resource-constrained environments with production-grade quality, including memory safety, privilege separation, and failure mode analysis."}
- {"name":"Systems Programming Languages","description":"Advanced proficiency in C, C++, or Rust for implementing low-level systems software, cryptographic services, device drivers, and secure components with attention to security properties and performance."}
- {"name":"Applied Cryptography","description":"Strong foundational knowledge of digital signatures, key hierarchies, secure key management, cryptographic protocol design, and ability to evaluate and implement cryptographic security designs."}
- {"name":"PKI and X.509 Certificates","description":"Comprehensive understanding of Public Key Infrastructure, X.509 certificate standards, certificate authorities, issuance workflows, and certificate lifecycle management protocols."}
- {"name":"PKCS#11 and Cryptographic Interfaces","description":"Hands-on experience implementing or extending PKCS#11 providers, OpenSSL providers/engines, or comparable hardware-security interfaces and cryptographic service integrations."}
- {"name":"Secure Boot and Hardware Trust","description":"Working knowledge of secure boot mechanisms, measured boot, device identity systems, remote attestation, hardware-backed storage, and hardware trust boundary design."}
- {"name":"Threat Modeling and Security Analysis","description":"Ability to identify attack surfaces, model hardware and software trust boundaries, translate security findings into engineering improvements, and reason about side-channel and physical attack considerations."}
- {"name":"Production Systems Design","description":"Proven track record designing, implementing, debugging, and shipping production-grade systems software with attention to reliability, debuggability, and operational characteristics."}

### preferred

- {"name":"ARM TrustZone and TEE Development","description":"Firmware development experience for ARM TrustZone or other trusted execution environments with secure world/normal world architecture knowledge."}
- {"name":"Commercial HSM Platform Experience","description":"Hands-on experience with enterprise HSM platforms including Thales Luna, Entrust nShield, Utimaco, Marvell LiquidSecurity, AWS CloudHSM, or equivalent systems."}
- {"name":"Device Manufacturing and Provisioning","description":"Experience with device manufacturing workflows, secure provisioning protocols, factory restore procedures, key injection, and silicon bring-up activities."}
- {"name":"Advanced Boot and Update Security","description":"Expertise in secure boot ROM, bootloader development, firmware signing, anti-rollback mechanisms, authenticated update protocols, and key derivation strategies."}
- {"name":"Multi-Party Authorization Systems","description":"Experience designing and implementing quorum-controlled deployments, tamper-resistant audit mechanisms, attestable policy systems, and multi-signature authorization frameworks."}
- {"name":"Hardware-Software Co-Design","description":"Collaboration experience with cryptographic accelerators, secure processors, or custom silicon development, including understanding of hardware capabilities and constraints."}
- {"name":"Secure Storage Systems","description":"Experience building secure or private storage systems protected by hardware-backed keys with encryption at rest and secure key rotation capabilities."}
- {"name":"Security Testing and Validation","description":"Development of test harnesses, emulators, fuzzing frameworks, fault injection tools, and security property validation techniques for embedded security software."}
- {"name":"High-Assurance Software Operations","description":"Experience sustaining security-critical software in production environments, managing security patches, incident response, and maintaining system integrity over time."}

## Tech stack

### tools

### others

### databases

### languages

### frameworks

## Benefits

### benefits

## Compensation

- **max:** 280000
- **min:** 200000
- **currency:** USD
- **stockOptions:** true

## Interview process

### steps

## Full description
We are hiring a Security Software Engineer to design and implement the hardware-backed security foundations used across OpenAI’s device ecosystem.

A central focus of this role is hardening the boundary between our policy systems and the HSMs that protect sensitive cryptographic keys. This boundary determines which operations may be performed, what may be signed, which policies must be satisfied, and how changes to trusted software and policy are authorized.

You will develop security-critical software and firmware within, or immediately adjacent to, an HSM trust boundary. Depending on your background, this may include HSM trusted applications, firmware services, cryptographic mechanisms, device drivers, PKCS#11 components, secure-provisioning protocols, or signing-policy enforcement systems.

This is a hands-on software-engineering role. You will be expected to design systems, write and review production code, debug across hardware and software boundaries, and carry projects from initial requirements through deployment. It is not an HSM administration, PKI operations, compliance, or architecture-only position.

**In This Role, You Will**

* Design and implement security-critical software and firmware for HSMs, secure elements, trusted execution environments, and hardware roots of trust.
* Build and harden the policy-to-HSM boundary responsible for authorizing certificate issuance and cryptographic signing operations.
* Develop HSM trusted applications, firmware components, host interfaces, device drivers, SDKs, or cryptographic service integrations.
* Implement or extend cryptographic interfaces such as PKCS#11, OpenSSL providers or engines, platform key-storage APIs, or comparable hardware-security interfaces.
* Build firmware and software that cryptographically enforces key generation, provisioning, usage, rotation, recovery, and destruction policies.
* Design and implement HSM-backed certificate authority, code-signing, key-management, and device-identity systems.
* Develop end-to-end cryptographic protocols spanning devices, secure hardware, policy services, and backend infrastructure.
* Build security capabilities supporting device attestation, secure boot, factory provisioning and restoration, user registration, and authentication.
* Design controls that make trusted software and policy changes verifiable, auditable, and subject to appropriate multi-party authorization.
* Write, review, test, and audit secure embedded software for resource-constrained environments.
* Develop test harnesses, emulators, fuzzers, and fault-injection tooling to validate security properties and failure behavior.
* Threat-model hardware and software trust boundaries and translate findings into concrete engineering improvements.
* Partner with hardware, firmware, infrastructure, application, and security teams to integrate secure-by-default capabilities into production systems.
* Help establish engineering standards for HSM development, applied cryptography, secure key management, and certificate infrastructure.

**Minimum Qualifications**

* 5+ years experience building secure embedded firmware for constrained environments
* Deep programming experience in C, C++, or Rust.

**You Might Thrive in This Role If You Have**

* A strong track record of designing, implementing, debugging, and shipping production systems software.
* Hands-on experience developing security-critical software or firmware within, or directly adjacent to, an HSM, secure element, TEE, or hardware root of trust.
* Experience developing one or more of the following:

  * HSM firmware or trusted applications
  * Cryptographic mechanisms or hardware-accelerated cryptographic services
  * HSM device drivers, host libraries, SDKs, or middleware
  * PKCS#11 providers, mechanisms, or integrations
  * Secure key-provisioning or key-injection protocols
  * HSM-backed certificate authority or code-signing systems
  * Signing-policy enforcement within a hardware-backed trust boundary
* Strong knowledge of applied cryptography, digital signatures, key hierarchies, secure key management, and cryptographic protocol design.
* Experience with PKI, X.509 certificates, certificate authorities, certificate issuance, and certificate lifecycle protocols.
* Familiarity with secure boot, measured boot, device identity, remote attestation, or hardware-backed storage.
* Experience reasoning about concurrency, memory safety, privilege separation, hardware interfaces, failure modes, and side-channel or physical attack considerations.
* The ability to evaluate security designs and personally implement the software required to realize them.
* Clear communication skills and the ability to collaborate across hardware, firmware, backend, and product teams.

**Additional Experience That May Be Helpful**

* Firmware development for ARM TrustZone or another trusted execution environment.
* Experience with commercial or cloud HSM platforms such as Thales Luna, Entrust/nShield, Utimaco, Marvell LiquidSecurity, AWS CloudHSM, or comparable systems.
* Experience with PKCS#11, KMIP, OpenSSL providers or engines, secure-element APIs, or platform-native key-storage frameworks.
* Device manufacturing, secure provisioning, factory restore, or silicon bring-up experience.
* Secure boot ROM, bootloader, firmware-signing, anti-rollback, or authenticated-update development.
* Developing trusted applications or cryptographic services inside an HSM or secure coprocessor.
* Hardware/software co-design involving cryptographic accelerators, secure processors, or custom silicon.
* Multi-party authorization, quorum-controlled deployments, tamper-resistant audit mechanisms, or attestable policy systems.
* Secure or private storage systems based on hardware-protected keys.
* Experience sustaining high-assurance security software in production.

**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.

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