Physical Security Systems Engineer

About the Team

The Physical Security Engineering team designs, deploys, and sustains the systems that protect OpenAI’s people, facilities, and critical infrastructure. We work across global office campuses, warehouses, labs and data centers, partnering with IT, Facilities, Construction, and Security Operations to ensure all environments meet stringent safety, reliability, and compliance requirements.

Our team owns security architecture from early site due-diligence through construction, commissioning, and long-term lifecycle management.

About the Role

OpenAI’s physical security technology environment is growing quickly, and the Corporate Security Technology Group needs a hands-on systems engineer who can keep the stack stable, responsive, and scalable day to day. This role is a hybrid of physical security infrastructure engineering, operational systems support, stakeholder coordination, and vendor management. It should not be framed as a badge or camera administrator role.

This person will support the systems that power OpenAI’s access control, video surveillance, GSOC workflows, and physical security operations. They will troubleshoot technical issues, manage operational tickets and escalations, coordinate remediation with integrators, support system programming and audits, and partner closely with IT/NetEng and Workplace to keep systems reliable as OpenAI expands.

This role is based in our San Francisco office and requires onsite presence 5 days per week.

In this role, you will

• Troubleshoot complex physical security system issues across access control, video management, GSOC workflows, and supporting infrastructure.

• Manage operational tickets and escalations with strong follow-through, documentation, and root-cause thinking.

• Coordinate service requests, remediation work, and quality control with security integrators and vendors.

• Support GSOC workflows, including system access management, auditing, feature requests, and security systems programming.

• Partner with networking and infrastructure teams on VLANs, firewall policies, IP schemas, switch configurations, IoT device connectivity, Windows Server, and database dependencies.

• Improve operational consistency across offices by reducing manual work, documenting repeatable processes, and identifying automation opportunities.

What’s success?

Security Operations, GSOC, Workplace, IT, and CorpSec partners can rely on stable, accurate, and well-supported physical security systems. Issues are triaged quickly, escalations have clear ownership, vendors receive precise direction, and recurring problems turn into better documentation, process, or automation. The hire helps the team support rapid office growth without letting reliability or operational quality drift.

Non-negotiable outcomes

• Physical security systems issues are handled with clear triage, strong technical reasoning, and complete follow-through.

• GSOC and Security Operations can depend on accurate access management, auditing, system programming, and support workflows.

• Integrator and vendor work is coordinated tightly, with clear accountability and reduced back-and-forth.

• Networking, server, database, and device dependencies are understood well enough to diagnose issues across the full stack.

• Operational toil and vendor dependency decrease through better documentation, process improvements, and automation opportunities.

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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