Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Identity sits at the center of modern SaaS, shaping how users, enterprises, developers, and increasingly agents authenticate and interact across products. This Engineering Manager role is featured because it focuses on the account layer that many other capabilities depend on, with clear emphasis on availability, security, and latency at significant scale. In SaaS terms, it is foundational platform work rather than a single product surface, which tends to influence reliability and trust across an entire portfolio.
For a long-term SaaS career, leading identity infrastructure is a durable way to build systems thinking across authentication, token exchange, edge validation, and secure access patterns. The remit naturally develops judgment around operational excellence, incident tradeoffs, and designing for high throughput while protecting privacy. It also strengthens cross-functional leadership, since identity platforms typically require tight coordination with product, security, and other infrastructure teams.
This role tends to suit managers who want to stay close to deep technical architecture while being accountable for team performance and execution quality. It aligns with professionals who prefer working on shared services with clear internal customers and measurable platform outcomes. It is also a strong fit for leaders who value rigor in reliability and security, and who are comfortable making long-horizon technical decisions that other teams build upon.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
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 Infrastructure, 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.
We’re looking for people who combine strong infrastructure depth with people leadership—someone who can guide technical strategy, run reliable operations, and build a high-performing team delivering mission-critical systems.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
What You’ll Do:
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 3+ years of experience managing high-performance engineering teams in fast-paced, rapidly shifting environments.
Have 10+ years of experience building, scaling, and operating distributed systems at large scale.
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.
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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
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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.
