Software Engineer, Discovery Engineering

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 Privacy Platform 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, secure review) or eager to build expertise quickly.

• Able to communicate technical concepts — from storage governance to block-ID APIs — clearly to teams such as Legal, Engineering, and others.

• Have shipped secure solutions that balance speed, cost, and evidentiary defensibility—and can articulate the trade‑offs.

• Communicate crisply, document rigorously, and enjoy working across disciplines under tight deadlines.

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 do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status.

For US Based Candidates: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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

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.