[Hiring] Data Scientist, Cybersecurity @OpenAI

Role Description

We are looking for a senior data scientist to help define what effective cybersecurity looks like in the age of AI agents. You will work across OpenAI’s Security organization and cybersecurity product teams to measure emerging risks, improve internal security controls, and shape AI-powered security products. This is a high-ownership role for someone who can establish a new analytical discipline, operate across organizational boundaries, and turn ambiguous security challenges into measurable improvements.

In This Role You Will

• Define how we measure AI-agent security.
• Establish metrics and evaluation frameworks for security-control coverage, agent behavior, sensitive actions, access patterns, detection quality, and emerging risks.
• Improve security controls without introducing unnecessary friction.
• Quantify the effectiveness and operational costs of safeguards, including false positives, blocked actions, escalations, approval delays, and recovery paths.
• Build the data foundations for security decisions.
• Partner with engineering and data teams to improve instrumentation, connect fragmented telemetry, establish trusted datasets, and surface important coverage and data-quality gaps.
• Strengthen detection and response.
• Identify meaningful signals of anomalous behavior, risky access, sensitive-data exposure, and other security-relevant activity.
• Shape AI-powered cybersecurity products.
• Develop evaluation systems for security findings.
• Understand the complete security workflow.
• Design rigorous measurement and experimentation strategies.
• Translate analysis into security and product strategy.
• Help establish a new security data science capability.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in data science, applied research, analytics, or a related quantitative field, with a track record of owning ambiguous, high-impact problems.
• Experience in cybersecurity, trust and safety, fraud or abuse prevention, privacy, platform integrity, or another domain involving adversarial behavior and difficult-to-measure risks.
• Strong proficiency in SQL and Python, including experience investigating complex datasets, working through incomplete instrumentation, and building reproducible analytical workflows.
• Experience defining meaningful metrics and evaluation frameworks when ground truth is limited, outcomes are delayed, or important risks cannot be observed directly.
• Strong judgment in experimentation, causal inference, observational analysis, and the practical limitations of different measurement approaches.
• The ability to partner effectively with security engineers, product managers, software engineers, researchers, data engineers, and senior leaders.
• A demonstrated ability to translate technical analysis into concrete improvements in products, systems, controls, or organizational priorities.
• Comfort operating independently, defining a roadmap, and bringing structure to a domain without established processes or industry standards.

Requirements

• Experience with detection engineering, threat research, security operations, insider risk, identity and access management, or privacy-preserving security analytics.
• Familiarity with AI agents, large language models, model evaluations, automated code review, or AI-powered cybersecurity products.
• Experience evaluating security findings, vulnerability detection, remediation workflows, or developer-facing security tools.
• Experience balancing security effectiveness against user experience, including false positives, approval flows, operational burden, and recovery behavior.
• Experience building automated monitoring, anomaly detection, production-oriented data assets, or systems that connect model outputs to real-world outcomes.
• A track record of building new cross-functional measurement programs or establishing analytical capabilities from the ground up.

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.