The posting
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.
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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