Level

OpenAI

Engineering Manager, Identity Platform

OpenAI is hiring an Engineering Manager, Identity Platform for a remote role open to applicants in United States. It pays $293k-$385k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on OpenAI.

Level's read on this job

  • Level rates this role Little AI ●○○○: aI is not part of the work.
  • The posting lists this role as remote.
  • Tools and skills the posting cites include AI research, distributed systems and identity management.
  • Level classifies it as a lead role.
  • Level lists 795 other open roles at OpenAI.

AI in this role

Lead an engineering team building foundational identity, authentication, and access management services for AI platforms and applications.

ai-researchdistributed-systemsidentity-managementauthenticationsecurityteam-management

About the Team

Identity is the foundation of trust in an AI-powered world. As people build a rich personal and organizational context in ChatGPT, they need systems that protect it, remember it, and let them share it securely across apps and agents. Without strong identity, context stays locked away or exposed. With it, AI becomes safe, personal, and truly useful, empowering users while keeping control firmly in their hands. Our team builds the trusted OpenAI account layer that connects people, enterprises, developers, and agents to OpenAI apps and the broader AI ecosystem. Our systems are the front door to OpenAI—held to an exceptionally high bar for availability, security, and latency—and are depended on by many internal teams.

About the Role

As an Engineering Manager, Identity Platform you will lead a team owning foundational identity services that must be highly reliable, secure, and fast under extreme load. You’ll set direction, grow and support the team, and partner closely across engineering and security to strengthen the platform that enables trusted access to OpenAI products.

In this role, you will:

  • Build, lead, and develop a high-performing engineering team. Coach and mentor engineers and senior technical leads to increase their impact and support their growth.

  • Define and own the technical strategy, roadmap, and execution for OpenAI’s core identity systems.

  • Guide the architecture of distributed systems operating at massive scale, with high requirements for reliability, privacy, and performance.

  • Partner closely with Product and Infrastructure teams to support new product needs and uphold high system standards.

  • Ensure the team operates effectively, maintains strong engineering rigor, and consistently delivers against ambitious goals.

  • Establish processes and a culture that enable fast learning, high trust, and responsible innovation.

  • Lead the team responsible for the authentication stack and token exchange infrastructure, ensuring high availability, strong security posture, and low-latency performance.

  • Own and improve request validation at the edge for logged-in users, delivering extremely high reliability and fast validation under high throughput.

  • Oversee systems that enable secure access to user data, improving scalability, reliability, and access patterns for internal consumers across the company.

You might thrive in this role if you:

  • Have 10+ years of experience building, scaling, and operating distributed systems at large scale.

  • Have 3+ years of experience managing high-performance engineering teams in fast-paced, rapidly shifting environments.

  • Care deeply about people leadership, coaching, and helping engineers achieve peak performance.

  • Communicate clearly, think holistically, and make decisions grounded in both user needs and long-term sustainability.

  • Have experience managing an infrastructure team and are effective at hiring, coaching, and developing engineers while maintaining strong operational excellence.

  • Have deep experience building and operating high-scale backend systems, with a track record of improving reliability, latency, and security in production.

  • Bring broad infrastructure expertise across the stack—from hardware and cluster management to services and storage layers.

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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

How we rate this

Engineering Manager, Identity Platform at OpenAI rates 25 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Little AI. AI is not part of the work.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI ResearchDistributed SystemsIdentity ManagementAuthenticationSecurityTeam Management

Questions you could be asked

  1. Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
  2. Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
  3. Tell me about a project where identity management was part of your work. What did you do?
  4. Tell me about a project where authentication was part of your work. What did you do?
  5. Tell me about a project where security was part of your work. What did you do?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: AI Research, Distributed Systems, Identity Management, Authentication, and Security. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.

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