Software Engineer, Privacy Engineering

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend systems and workflow tooling for the full lifecycle of lawful data access requests, from intake and scoping through authorized retrieval, review, preparation, and audit.
• Build reliable data pipelines and interfaces across products and data stores so authorized teams can locate and handle the right records accurately and reproducibly.
• Implement least-privilege access, approval gates, provenance, audit trails, data minimization, and safe failure modes for sensitive workflows.
• Partner with Legal and Legal Operations to translate legal and operational requirements into clear technical designs and intuitive operator experiences.
• Identify responsible automation opportunities that reduce repetitive work while preserving human review, judgment, and accountability.
• Own production systems through testing, observability, incident response, documentation, and continuous reliability improvements.
• Help define the architecture and roadmap for reusable privacy and legal-infrastructure foundations as OpenAI’s products and obligations evolve.

Requirements

• Strong backend engineering fundamentals and experience building production services or data-intensive systems.
• Ability to reason carefully about correctness, authorization, security, and privacy when working with sensitive data.
• A track record of turning ambiguous requirements into pragmatic plans and communicating technical tradeoffs clearly.
• End-to-end ownership, including operating what you build, and comfort learning unfamiliar products and domains.
• Care for operator experience and a drive to make complex workflows safer, clearer, and more efficient.
• Experience collaborating across Engineering, Legal, operations, Privacy, and Security stakeholders.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience building or operating systems for lawful data access requests and understand the domain’s legal-process lifecycle, privacy and security constraints, auditability requirements, and operational sensitivities.