About the Role
We’re looking for a Senior Privacy Engineer to lead initiatives that ensure our products and infrastructure meet the highest standards of data protection and user privacy. You’ll work closely with cross-functional teams—including security, legal, product, infrastructure, and research—to design and implement privacy-enhancing technologies and compliance mechanisms at scale.
This is a hands-on, high-impact role for an experienced engineer who is passionate about protecting user data while enabling innovation.
This role is based in Seattle, WA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role, you will:
Architect and implement privacy-preserving systems across our data stack, including data collection, storage, processing, and access layers.
Develop and apply privacy engineering frameworks (e.g., data minimization, differential privacy, anonymization/pseudonymization techniques) to production services.
Build and scale privacy controls such as role-based access, audit logging, redaction/tokenization systems, data retention policies, and privacy incident detection.
Partner with infrastructure and product teams to integrate privacy requirements into system designs from the ground up.
Collaborate with legal, security, and compliance teams to translate regulatory obligations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA) into concrete technical controls and workflows.
Conduct privacy risk assessments and help teams mitigate identified risks through design changes, automation, or monitoring.
Mentor and support other engineers, elevating privacy as a core engineering discipline across the organization.
Drive cross-org initiatives, such as privacy reviews, developer education, or privacy tooling roadmaps.
You might thrive in this role if you:
5+ years of industry experience in software engineering, security engineering, or privacy engineering, with significant ownership of privacy or data protection features.
Strong software engineering fundamentals, with fluency in at least one major programming language (e.g., Python, Go, Rust, C++, Java).
Deep understanding of privacy technologies and principles, such as data anonymization, encryption, secure computation, privacy threat modeling, or differential privacy.
Experience building scalable infrastructure and implementing controls in distributed systems, data platforms, or ML pipelines.
Familiarity with global privacy regulations and their technical 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.
Nice to Have
Experience with cloud platforms (e.g., Azure, AWS, GCP) and large-scale data systems.
Background in security engineering, trust & safety, or data governance.
Contributions to privacy open-source projects or research.
Prior experience in a regulated or highly sensitive data environment.
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.
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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.
