# Engineering Manager, Identity Infrastructure

**Company:** [OpenAI](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/openai)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** Engineering Management
**Salary:** $293k – $385k/yr
**Skills:** Distributed Systems, Authentication, Token Exchange, Request Validation, Infrastructure, Backend Systems, Cluster Management, Scalability, Reliability, Security
**Posted:** 2026-01-28

> Leads engineering team building highly reliable, secure, and scalable identity infrastructure for OpenAI products. Requires 3+ years managing teams and 10+ years in distributed systems with strong people leadership.

## Job Description

## 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.

## Similar roles

- [Engineering Manager, Model Flywheel](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/225181ee-3fb7-4a8d-9389-051025d8ebe3) - OpenAI - San Francisco, CA - $293k – $385k/yr
- [Engineering Manager, ChatGPT Premium](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/201b763c-ee62-4de9-92a0-6e31c480fcfa) - OpenAI - San Francisco, CA - $293k – $385k/yr
- [Engineering Manager, Multimodal (API)](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/a5ec39e7-9164-485e-ac39-16eafc7b9689) - OpenAI - San Francisco, CA - $293k – $385k/yr
- [IC Agentic Engineering Manager - Stargate](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/2f8ba0b3-2b3a-423c-8cb3-ed784ff12958) - OpenAI - San Francisco, CA - $293k – $490k/yr
- [Engineering Manager, Distillation & Dectection Platform](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/42cb345e-63af-47e3-8ea7-231b22108fee) - OpenAI - San Francisco, CA - $293k – $385k/yr

**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/ef9b8d43-0289-4521-a380-b42ebba898e0
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/ef9b8d43-0289-4521-a380-b42ebba898e0