Software Engineer, Privacy Engineering

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 AI capabilities and strive to safely deploy them through our products. We believe AI is a powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, valuing diverse perspectives to achieve our mission.

Introduction

The Privacy Engineering team at OpenAI builds foundational systems to govern user data, ensuring it is understood, retained, accessed, and used appropriately. This role involves partnering with Product, Data, Infrastructure, Security, and Legal teams to implement policies into robust architectural controls.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical strategy and architecture for user data governance, including data mapping, classification, lineage, retention, deletion, access, and permitted usage.
• Design and build shared services, APIs, metadata systems, and policy-enforcement mechanisms to ensure consistent, scalable, and auditable governance controls.
• Establish reliable inventories of user data, system ownership, data flows, and policy applicability across various products, infrastructure, analytics, and research systems.
• Collaborate with leaders across Product, Data, Infrastructure, Security, and Legal to define decision rights, translate requirements into controls, and drive adoption.
• Take end-to-end ownership of governance systems in production, including measurable controls, observability, migrations, exception handling, incident response, and continuous improvement.

Requirements

• Substantial experience designing and operating large-scale data platforms, privacy infrastructure, or governance systems in complex production environments.
• Proven experience leading architecture and multi-team execution for data-governance domains (e.g., metadata and lineage, retention and deletion, access governance, or data-use controls).
• Ability to translate ambiguous policy, legal, security, and product requirements into clear system boundaries, technical standards, phased roadmaps, and measurable outcomes.
• Strong ability to influence senior stakeholders and engineering teams, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and build durable cross-functional alignment.
• Demonstrated end-to-end ownership of high-trust systems, focusing on correctness, scalability, auditability, operational resilience, and developer/operator experience.

About Company

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 AI capabilities and strive to safely deploy them through our products. We believe AI is a powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, valuing diverse perspectives to achieve our mission.

How to Apply

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