Software Engineer, Host Assurance

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Software Engineer, Host Assurance will build and operate services, APIs, and host software that establish trust in compute infrastructure, including machine identity, certificate issuance, secure bootstrap, and host attestation. The role owns production software across design, implementation, testing, rollout, observability, and operation while partnering across infrastructure, hardware, firmware, and security teams.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and operate components of the Host Assurance platform that establish trust in both bare-metal & VM hosts before they are eligible for production use
• Help ensure hosts are verifiably trustworthy from delivery and installation through secure bootstrap and readiness to join orchestration systems
• Build and improve systems such as machine identity, certificate issuance and enrollment, HSM-backed or key-management-backed trust services, host attestation, measurement, and baseline verification tooling
• Validate delivered hardware and firmware against vendor claims and continuously detect and manage drift over time
• Eliminate insecure bootstrap patterns while preserving deployment throughput and operational reliability. Partner with provisioning, fleet, and orchestration teams to deliver paved paths where the secure approach is the easiest approach
• Own software components through implementation, operational readiness, launch, and ongoing operation. Define readiness criteria, validate behavior under load and failure, establish monitoring and actionable alerts, plan staged rollouts and tested recovery procedures, and maintain runbooks. Use production experience to improve reliability and reduce operational burden
• Participate in production support via oncall rotation
• Help define observable, testable security properties for host platforms and improve the telemetry and validation needed to enforce them in practice
• Work across different deployment models and provider boundaries while maintaining a consistent bar for host trust outcomes

Requirements:

• Have strong software engineering experience building and operating reliable production systems at scale
• Bring depth in distributed systems, backend or platform engineering, operating systems, or infrastructure security
• Can reason across services, APIs, and host software, and learn the boot, firmware, and hardware trust mechanisms relevant to your work. Apply sound judgment to trust boundaries, correctness, and safe failure behavior
• Have experience writing production quality code and ability to reason clearly about failure modes, operational safety, and long-term maintainability
• Have experience supporting critical production systems at scale, such as being on-call
• Balance rigor with pragmatism, and care about making strong security controls deployable in real-world environments
• Are self-directed, low ego, and willing to work across disciplines to solve the most important problems
• Enjoy building in ambiguous spaces where the architecture is still emerging, stakes are at all time high, and the future is being built
• Experience with PKI, HSMs, machine identity, attestation, secure boot, or hardware security is valuable but not required