Software Engineer, Privacy Infrastructure

About the Team

OpenAI’s Privacy Engineering team sits at the intersection of Security, Privacy, Legal, and Core Infrastructure. Our mission is to build data infrastructure and systems to support our privacy, legal, and security teams—securely, quickly, and at scale. Our guiding principles include: defensibility by default, enabling researchers, preparing for future transformative technologies, and building a robust security culture.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Software Engineer who can design and operate technical systems that support legal compliance workflows, including secure data processing and document review. You’ll partner daily with Legal, Security, IT, and partner engineering teams to turn legal processes into concrete technical workflows. This role is ideal for an engineer who loves large‑scale data problems and understands the rigor required when the results may be scrutinized.

This position is located in San Francisco. Relocation assistance is available.

In this role, you will:

- Design and operate data storage pipelines that can operate at scale.

- Build search & discovery services (e.g., Spark/Databricks, index layers, metadata catalogs) based on the needs of partner teams.

- Automate secure data transfers—encrypting, checksumming, and auditing exports to reviewers.

- Stand up locked‑down compute environments that balance usability with security controls.

- Instrument monitoring and KPIs that maintain accountability of data holds and productions.

- Collaborate cross‑functionally to codify SOPs, threat models, and chain‑of‑custody documentation that withstand scrutiny.

You might thrive in this role if you:

- Have hands‑on experience building or operating large‑scale data‑lake or backup systems (Azure, AWS, GCP).

- Know your way around Terraform or Pulumi, CI/CD, and can turn ad‑hoc legal requests into repeatable pipelines.

- Comfortable working with discovery workflows (legal holds, enterprise document collections, secu...