Cyber Forward Deployed Engineer: AI Defense in Production

OpenAI, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Travel up to 50%

Job summary

OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with customers to bring frontier AI into production. In this hybrid role based in San Francisco, you will work with security leaders to scope engagements, design secure AI-enabled defenses, and deploy trusted solutions at enterprise scale.

You’ll build and evaluate AI agents for software engineering workflows, integrate them into security workflows, and guide production rollouts with observability and controls. Travel up to 50% is required.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, including shipping production software.
• Experience protecting production systems through security engineering, infrastructure, SRE, DevOps, or product engineering.
• Experience building and evaluating AI agents for software engineering workflows.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and practices that maintain code quality, reliability, and security.
• Ability to navigate unfamiliar codebases and contribute production‑quality changes.
• Ability to communicate technical concepts and trade-offs to engineering teams and senior security stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Partner with customer security leaders and OpenAI’s Go-to-Market team to scope engagements, establish responsibilities, and define measurable success criteria.
• Lead technical design and implementation alongside customer engineers. Integrate agents into security workflows, establish access boundaries, and determine which actions require human review.
• Build evaluations grounded in defender decisions, e.g., test a patch's effect on security and usability.
• Guide production rollout with the engineers who will operate the system, providing observability and controls.
• Translate successful approaches into reusable tools and practices for other defenders.

Skills

Software engineering

Security engineering

AI agents

CI/CD pipelines

Stakeholder communication

Tools

Sigma

YARA

Splunk

KQL

Cloud IAM

Job description

OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with customers to bring frontier AI into production. In this hybrid role based in San Francisco, you will work with security leaders to scope engagements, design secure AI-enabled defenses, and deploy trusted solutions at enterprise scale.

You’ll build and evaluate AI agents for software engineering workflows, integrate them into security workflows, and guide production rollouts with observability and controls. Travel up to 50% is required.