Software Engineer, Privacy Engineering (Lawful Access)

About the Team

The Privacy Engineering team builds secure, reliable systems that help OpenAI meet its legal obligations while protecting user data. We partner closely with Legal and Engineering teams across OpenAI to support lawful data access requests and other critical legal workflows. Our work turns complex, high-stakes processes into auditable and dependable technical systems with clear human oversight and strong privacy and security controls.

About the Role

We’re looking for a full-stack Software Engineer to build the internal tools and data pipelines that power lawful data access request workflows and Legal Operations. You will work across product and data systems to make authorized retrieval and case handling accurate, efficient, and auditable. This role is well suited to someone who enjoys translating ambiguous operational requirements into durable systems, cares deeply about sensitive-data handling, and wants to improve both technical reliability and the day-to-day experience of the people operating these workflows.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA, with two additional locations under consideration: London, UK, and Dublin, Ireland. 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:

• 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.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 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.
• 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.

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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.

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 …