Software Engineer, Privacy Engineering

About the Team The Privacy Engineering team builds the systems and technical foundations that govern how user data is understood, retained, accessed, and used across OpenAI. We partner with Product, Data, Infrastructure, Security, and Legal to translate policy and trust commitments into durable architecture and enforceable controls. Our work spans data inventory and mapping, classification and lineage, retention and deletion, access governance, purpose and usage controls, auditability, and lifecycle automation. We aim to make policy-aligned data handling the default while giving teams clear, reliable primitives for building and operating products at scale. About the Role We are looking for an experienced Software Engineer to drive the architecture and execution of user data governance across OpenAI. You will define technical direction, build shared platforms and controls, and lead cross-functional programs that make data flows discoverable, policies enforceable, and ownership explicit. This role is well suited to a senior engineer who can move between deep systems design and organization-wide influence, turn ambiguous requirements into pragmatic roadmaps, and operate high-trust systems end to end. This position is based in San Francisco. Relocation assistance is available. In this role, you will: - Set the technical strategy and architecture for user data governance across data mapping, classification, lineage, retention, deletion, access, and permitted usage. - Design and build shared services, APIs, metadata systems, and policy-enforcement mechanisms that make governance controls consistent, scalable, and auditable. - Establish reliable inventories of user data, system ownership, data flows, and policy applicability across products, infrastructure, analytics, and research systems. - Partner with Product, Data, Infrastructure, Security, and Legal leaders to define decision rights, translate requirements into controls, and drive adoption across teams. - Own governance systems in production through measurable controls, observability, migrations, exception handling, incident response, and continuous improvement. You might thrive in this role if you: - Have substantial experience designing and operating large-scale data platforms, privacy infrastructure, or governance systems in complex production environments. - Have led architecture and multi-team execution for one or more data-governance domains, such as metadata and lineage, retention and deletion, access governance, or data-use controls. - Can translate ambiguous policy, legal, security, and product requirements into clear system boundaries, technical standards, phased roadmaps, and measurable outcomes. - Influence senior stakeholders and engineering teams without relying on formal authority, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and build durable cross-functional alignment. - Take end-to-end ownership of high-trust systems, including correctness, scalability, auditability, operational resilience, and the developer and operator experience. 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 se