5-7 years of experience in security engineering or related fields
Proven track record in hiring and developing technical teams
Strong understanding of AI and its application in cybersecurity
Experience with threat detection and incident response
Ability to prototype tools and write code for security solutions
Familiarity with infrastructure telemetry and security operations
Demonstrated ability to balance security needs with operational efficiency
Responsibilities
Hire, coach, and develop a high-performing engineering team
Set a threat-informed roadmap prioritizing detection and response efforts
Own the complete workflow for detection and investigation
Build tailored response and containment capabilities for infrastructure
Apply AI models throughout the detection engineering lifecycle
Prototype and evaluate new defense strategies using AI
Anticipate emerging threats and translate findings into actionable hypotheses
Establish necessary visibility for effective threat detection and response
Engineer workflows for measurable security outcomes
Contribute expertise during security incidents
Benefits
Collaborative work environment with cutting-edge technology
Opportunities for professional growth and development
Access to advanced AI tools and resources
Engagement with a diverse team of experts
Flexible work arrangements to support work-life balance
Full Job Description
About the role
We're looking for a hands-on technical leader to guide the engineers who identify and investigate threats to OpenAI and build the capabilities to contain them. You'll hire and develop engineers, set technical direction, and prioritize risks to OpenAI's intellectual property, customer data, and critical infrastructure.
Your team will take an agent-first approach across the detection and response lifecycle, using OpenAI's models to develop detections, triage signals, investigate suspicious activity, and support bounded response and continuous improvement. You'll turn advances in model capability into dependable defenses, own their effectiveness, and work with security, research, and infrastructure partners to ensure findings lead to effective action. You'll establish where agents can act independently and where human judgment and approval are essential.
In this role, you will:
Hire, coach, and develop engineers. Set clear expectations, provide regular feedback, grow technical leadership, and build a team that reviews work rigorously and learns from missed detections and noisy signals.
Set a threat-informed roadmap. Prioritize detection work based on how external and internal actors could target the systems where we train and evaluate frontier models, the production services that run inference and power our products worldwide, the datacenter hardware and networks that support both, and the devices, identities, and applications employees rely on. Balance investment in emerging threats with closing known coverage gaps and keeping existing detections effective.
Own detection and investigation as a complete workflow. Embed agent-driven triage and investigation in the detections your team operates. Surface findings when the evidence points to a likely threat that warrants action. When a finding warrants formal incident response, bring the evidence to the Security Incident Response Team (SIRT) and support the investigation SIRT leads.
Build response and containment capabilities tailored to our infrastructure. Work with infrastructure and system owners to develop and test the controls responders need to contain threats in their environments. Define when human approval is required and how to verify that containment worked.
Apply models across the detection engineering lifecycle. Use OpenAI's models to help develop threat hypotheses, author and test detections, deploy and tune them, and incorporate investigation findings into better coverage. Evaluate the effectiveness of individual agents and the complete workflows they support.
Turn model advances into tested defenses. Prototype new approaches using OpenAI's models, evaluate them against realistic adversary behavior and analyst baselines, and move successful experiments into production. Use operational evidence to identify model limitations and partner with Research and Engineering to address them.
Anticipate emerging threats. Translate adversary intelligence and incident findings into testable detection hypotheses. Work with researchers and infrastructure owners on risks specific to a frontier AI lab, such as increasingly capable agents operating across systems with access to sensitive research. Determine what evidence would reveal compromise and what response would be effective.
Establish the visibility needed to detect, investigate, and respond. Partner with Security Observability and infrastructure owners to define telemetry and forensic data requirements. Drive improvements where missing evidence, unreliable data, or limited controls prevent the team from identifying threats or taking effective action.
Engineer for measurable security outcomes. Use replay, adversarial validation, and regression testing to assess whether workflows find intended threats, distinguish benign activity, and reach defensible conclusions. Establish code review, documentation, staged rollout, monitoring, and rollback practices. Measure coverage, investigation accuracy, time to identify threats, and effectiveness of response.
Contribute during incidents. The Security Incident Response Team (SIRT) leads formal incident response. Your team contributes investigative expertise and uses incident findings to improve detections.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Think like an adversary and demand evidence as a defender. You question whether apparent coverage would survive a determined attacker, distinguish plausible explanations from supported conclusions, and stay accountable for threats that existing tools and playbooks miss.
Have managed security or software engineers and can demonstrate how you have hired, coached, developed technical judgment, and improved a team's ability to deliver.
Are a hands-on builder who can prototype tools, write and review code, and guide engineers through complex detection, investigation, and response designs.
Bring strong AI fluency and have built systems that test how models or agents can improve cyber defense. You have evaluated real security workflows against meaningful baselines and can explain what improved, what failed, and what you changed. You understand model failure modes and design reliable workflows with bounded permissions and clear human decision points.
Have built or operated threat detections and led technical investigations. You understand adversary tradecraft and can assess evidence, scope, and uncertainty across complex environments.
Understand how identity, endpoint, cloud, Kubernetes, and infrastructure telemetry supports investigations. You can reason about response and containment in unfamiliar systems and work with their owners to build practical capabilities.
Have used testing and operational feedback to improve security outcomes. You can explain tradeoffs among coverage, accuracy, speed, and human workload, and choose measures that reflect whether threats are being found and addressed.
Can build a focused roadmap and strong cross-functional partnerships in a rapidly changing environment. You enable researchers and engineers to move quickly while following through on security requirements and dependable operations.
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.
