OpenAI · 2 months ago
Software Engineer - Privacy & Compliance
Seattle
Full-time
Onsite
Senior Level
$255K/yr - $405K/yr
5+ years expOpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. They are seeking a Software Engineer to architect and build backend systems that enforce data privacy and automate compliance at scale, working closely with various teams to embed privacy-by-design into their data and access layers.
Agentic AIArtificial Intelligence (AI)Foundational AIGenerative AIMachine LearningNatural Language ProcessingSaaS
Responsibilities
Design, build, and operate backend services that enforce policy-driven data access, lifecycle controls, and privacy protections
Develop distributed authorization and identity-aware enforcement mechanisms integrated directly into data services and control planes
Implement auditability, policy hooks, and enforcement observability to ensure compliance is continuously verifiable
Partner with Security, Legal, and Compliance to convert privacy requirements into scalable technical designs and developer-friendly APIs
Harden data platforms and backend services through schema-level controls and data handling constraints by default
Collaborate with infrastructure teams to ensure consistent enforcement across systems while minimizing duplicated implementations
Contribute patterns, libraries, and education that elevate trustworthy data access patterns across the organization
Qualification
Required
5+ years of industry experience building and operating backend or infrastructure systems in production
Strong software engineering fundamentals, with fluency in at least one major programming language (e.g., Python, Go, Rust, C++, Java)
Experience with distributed authorization, RBAC/ACL systems, encryption-based access, or policy engines
Familiarity with global privacy regulations and their architectural implications
Ability to influence and collaborate with teams across legal, compliance, product, and engineering
A bias toward practical, impactful solutions that balance privacy protections with product needs
Preferred
Experience with cloud platforms (e.g., Azure, AWS, GCP) and large-scale data systems
Background in security engineering, privacy engineering, or data governance
Experience with control-plane or metadata-driven enforcement systems
Exposure to data platforms or ML infrastructure
Prior experience in a regulated or highly sensitive data environment
Company
OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company that develops advanced AI models, including ChatGPT. It is a sub-organization of OpenAI Foundation.
201-500 employees
H1B Sponsorship
OpenAI has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (1)
2024 (1)
2023 (1)
2022 (18)
2021 (10)
2020 (6)
Funding
Current Stage
Growth StageTotal Funding
$79BKey Investors
The Walt Disney CompanySoftBankThrive Capital
2025-12-11Corporate Round· $1B
2025-10-02Secondary Market· $6.6B
2025-03-31Series Unknown· $40B
Leadership Team
Sam Altman
CEO & Co-Founder
Greg Brockman
President, Chairman, & Co-Founder
Recent News
2026-01-14
Company data provided by crunchbase