[Hiring] Threat Detection and Response Engineering Manager @OpenAI

Role Description

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.

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.
• Own detection and investigation as a complete workflow. Embed agent-driven triage and investigation in the detections your team operates.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Anticipate emerging threats. Translate adversary intelligence and incident findings into testable detection hypotheses.
• Establish the visibility needed to detect, investigate, and respond. Partner with Security Observability and infrastructure owners to define telemetry and forensic data requirements.
• 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.
• 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.

Qualifications

• Think like an adversary and demand evidence as a defender.
• 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.
• Have built or operated threat detections and led technical investigations.
• Understand how identity, endpoint, cloud, Kubernetes, and infrastructure telemetry supports investigations.
• Have used testing and operational feedback to improve security outcomes.
• Can build a focused roadmap and strong cross-functional partnerships in a rapidly changing environment.

Company Description

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.

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.