Develop HSM trusted applications, firmware components, host interfaces, device drivers, SDKs, or cryptographic service integrations.
Implement or extend cryptographic interfaces such as PKCS#11, OpenSSL providers or engines, platform key-storage APIs, or comparable hardware-security interfaces.
Build firmware and software that cryptographically enforces key generation, provisioning, usage, rotation, recovery, and destruction policies.
Design and implement HSM-backed certificate authority, code-signing, key-management, and device-identity systems.
Develop end-to-end cryptographic protocols spanning devices, secure hardware, policy services, and backend infrastructure.
Build security capabilities supporting device attestation, secure boot, factory provisioning and restoration, user registration, and authentication.
Design controls that make trusted software and policy changes verifiable, auditable, and subject to appropriate multi-party authorization.
Write, review, test, and audit secure embedded software for resource-constrained environments.
Develop test harnesses, emulators, fuzzers, and fault-injection tooling to validate security properties and failure behavior.
Threat-model hardware and software trust boundaries and translate findings into concrete engineering improvements.
Partner with hardware, firmware, infrastructure, application, and security teams to integrate secure-by-default capabilities into production systems.
Help establish engineering standards for HSM development, applied cryptography, secure key management, and certificate infrastructure.
Minimum Qualifications
5+ years experience building secure embedded firmware for constrained environments
Deep programming experience in C, C++, or Rust.
You Might Thrive in This Role If You Have
A strong track record of designing, implementing, debugging, and shipping production systems software.
Hands-on experience developing security-critical software or firmware within, or directly adjacent to, an HSM, secure element, TEE, or hardware root of trust.
Experience developing one or more of the following
HSM firmware or trusted applications
Cryptographic mechanisms or hardware-accelerated cryptographic services
HSM device drivers, host libraries, SDKs, or middleware
PKCS#11 providers, mechanisms, or integrations
Secure key-provisioning or key-injection protocols
HSM-backed certificate authority or code-signing systems
Signing-policy enforcement within a hardware-backed trust boundary
Strong knowledge of applied cryptography, digital signatures, key hierarchies, secure key management, and cryptographic protocol design.
Experience with PKI, X.509 certificates, certificate authorities, certificate issuance, and certificate lifecycle protocols.
Familiarity with secure boot, measured boot, device identity, remote attestation, or hardware-backed storage.
Experience reasoning about concurrency, memory safety, privilege separation, hardware interfaces, failure modes, and side-channel or physical attack considerations.
The ability to evaluate security designs and personally implement the software required to realize them.
Clear communication skills and the ability to collaborate across hardware, firmware, backend, and product teams.
Additional Experience That May Be Helpful
Firmware development for ARM TrustZone or another trusted execution environment.
Experience with commercial or cloud HSM platforms such as Thales Luna, Entrust/nShield, Utimaco, Marvell LiquidSecurity, AWS CloudHSM, or comparable systems.
Experience with PKCS#11, KMIP, OpenSSL providers or engines, secure-element APIs, or platform-native key-storage frameworks.
Device manufacturing, secure provisioning, factory restore, or silicon bring-up experience.
Secure boot ROM, bootloader, firmware-signing, anti-rollback, or authenticated-update development.
Developing trusted applications or cryptographic services inside an HSM or secure coprocessor.
Hardware/software co-design involving cryptographic accelerators, secure processors, or custom silicon.
Multi-party authorization, quorum-controlled deployments, tamper-resistant audit mechanisms, or attestable policy systems.
Secure or private storage systems based on hardware-protected keys.
Experience sustaining high-assurance security software in production.
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.
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