The posting
ABOUT THE TEAM
Ensuring that advanced AI benefits humanity requires protecting the research, infrastructure, and trust that make its development and deployment possible. OpenAI Security defends our model IP, people, products, and users against sophisticated adversaries across GPU supercomputing, multicloud environments, datacenters, and emerging agent systems. The Security Incident Response Team (SIRT) leads the response when those defenses are tested—establishing what happened, limiting harm, and strengthening our ability to protect frontier AI.
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 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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.
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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