OpenAI
Software Engineer, Privacy Engineering (Lawful Access)
$347K–$385K
San Francisco · Full-time · Posted Oct 21, 2026
About the job
Build and operate internal software and data pipelines for lawful data access requests and related Legal Operations workflows, with strong privacy, security, auditability, and human oversight.
What you'll do
- Develop backend systems, workflow tools, data pipelines, and interfaces for the lifecycle of lawful data access requests.
- Implement access controls, approval gates, provenance, audit trails, data minimization, and safe failure modes for sensitive workflows.
- Partner with Legal and operational teams, and own production reliability, incident response, and ongoing improvements.
What they ask for
- Experience building or operating systems for lawful data access requests and understanding their legal-process lifecycle and privacy, security, and auditability constraints.
- Strong backend engineering fundamentals and experience building production services or data-intensive systems.
- Ability to reason carefully about correctness, authorization, security, and privacy with sensitive data.
- Track record of translating ambiguous requirements into pragmatic plans and communicating technical tradeoffs clearly.
Nice to have
- Experience collaborating across Engineering, Legal, operations, Privacy, and Security stakeholders.
- Curiosity about using AI tools and agents to improve engineering workflows for privacy-sensitive systems.
Pay
$347K – $385K (base salary)
AI focus
Explore responsible automation and AI tools or agents to reduce repetitive work and improve engineering workflows while preserving human review, judgment, and accountability.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative