5-7 years of experience in security incident response or related technical operations
Proven track record in hiring, coaching, and developing high-performing teams
Strong fluency in AI technologies and their application in security contexts
Hands-on experience with investigation across identity, cloud, and infrastructure systems
Demonstrated ability to lead complex incident responses and make timely decisions under pressure
Excellent communication skills for engaging with technical and non-technical stakeholders
Experience in improving operational processes and response playbooks
Responsibilities
Hire and develop a skilled incident response team with a focus on investigative depth and engineering ability
Lead incident command for complex threats, coordinating investigations and weighing containment options
Build AI-powered capabilities for evidence collection and response coordination
Establish investigation standards for sophisticated adversaries and insider threats
Drive incidents to closure, validating containment and tracking corrective actions
Coordinate with various stakeholders during incidents, providing clear updates to executives
Develop sustainable on-call coverage and training programs for the team
Benefits
Opportunity to work at the forefront of AI security
Collaborative environment with cross-functional teams
Access to cutting-edge AI technologies
Professional development and growth opportunities
Flexible work arrangements to support work-life balance
Full Job Description
About the role
We're looking for a hands-on technical leader to build the incident response team that protects OpenAI as AI capabilities and the threats surrounding them evolve. You will command consequential incidents, lead technically demanding investigations, and make containment and recovery decisions when evidence is incomplete and the stakes are high. You will also shape how frontier models change incident response: using OpenAI's own technology to help responders connect evidence, test hypotheses, and act effectively at a scale that manual workflows cannot support. Partnering with Research, Infrastructure, Product Security, Enterprise Security, IT, and Engineering, you will build exceptional responders, dependable AI-powered capabilities, and stronger defenses through every investigation.
In this role, you will:
Hire, coach, and develop exceptional incident responders who combine investigative depth, engineering ability, and sound judgment. Build a team that challenges assumptions, surfaces uncertainty early, and uses AI to expand its capabilities. Develop technical leaders who can make and explain difficult decisions under pressure.
Lead incident command for complex threats to OpenAI's research, products, and infrastructure. Establish severity and scope, coordinate investigation workstreams, and weigh containment options against ongoing exposure and disruption to research or production.
Build and ship agentic capabilities using OpenAI's models for evidence collection, investigation context, response coordination, and bounded response workflows. Partner with platform engineers to integrate tools and data, evaluate accuracy and failure modes, and ensure reliable, auditable operation with human approval for consequential actions.
Set investigation standards for sophisticated adversaries and insider threats across identity, endpoints, cloud, Kubernetes, and large-scale compute. Help responders reconstruct activity, test competing hypotheses, preserve evidence, and make uncertainty explicit.
Drive incidents to verified closure. Work with accountable owners to validate containment and recovery, document remaining risk, and track corrective actions that reduce the likelihood or impact of recurrence.
Coordinate with engineering, infrastructure, legal, privacy, and other stakeholders throughout an incident. Give executives clear updates on impact, uncertainty, decisions, and the next update without overstating what the evidence supports.
Build sustainable on-call coverage, escalation paths, and handoffs across regions. Balance urgent response with training and planned improvements, and protect the team's ability to recover after demanding incidents.
Build readiness into new research and infrastructure capabilities with their owners. Exercise playbooks, escalation paths, and containment options, including scenarios involving agents operating across systems at scale.
Turn incident evidence into stronger defenses with Detection Engineering, Threat Intelligence, Security Observability, and security platform teams. Identify what should have exposed an intrusion earlier, what prevented a faster or more confident investigation, and which capabilities would have changed the outcome. Translate those findings into tested improvements with clear owners.
Prioritize improvements using incident outcomes and readiness evidence. Measure response quality and effectiveness, make tradeoffs explicit, and address recurring friction without reducing success to ticket volume or speed alone.
You might thrive if you:
You are motivated by the responsibility of protecting frontier AI. You want to understand how powerful new systems can fail or be compromised, help their builders move forward securely, and use the same advances in AI to strengthen defenders.
You have managed security responders or a closely related technical operations team, with a record of hiring, coaching, delivering candid feedback, and helping people grow.
You bring strong AI fluency and an AI-first builder mindset. You have used models or agents to improve real investigation or response workflows and can show validated results. You understand their failure modes and pair ambitious automation with rigorous evaluations and human judgment.
You are a hands-on builder with deep investigation expertise across identity, cloud, host, and infrastructure systems. You can prototype tools, write scripts or code, and coach responders through difficult evidence questions, including unfamiliar parts of the stack.
You have commanded consequential incidents involving capable adversaries, leading technical teams and senior stakeholders from uncertain signals through verified recovery. You make timely, defensible decisions with incomplete information, recognize when new evidence requires a change in direction, and remain accountable for the consequences.
You communicate clearly with engineers, executives, and legal or privacy partners. You can explain uncertainty, document decision rationale, and keep stakeholders aligned as facts change.
You have improved on-call operations, response playbooks, or exercise programs, and understand how workload, handoffs, and team health affect response quality.
You can prioritize a small number of meaningful improvements, influence partners who own remediation, and follow through until the agreed outcome has been verified.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. The company was founded in 2015 by a group of technology leaders, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and John Schulman. OpenAI's mission is to develop and promote friendly AI for the betterment of humanity. The company has developed a number of cutting-edge AI technologies, including GPT-3, a language processing system that can generate human-like text. OpenAI has received funding from a number of high-profile investors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
