Detection & Response Security Engineer

OpenAI; California (MO); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a Security Engineer on Detection & Response to protect our assets, data, and infrastructure. You will build and operate systems to detect suspicious activity and respond effectively.

You will work across endpoints, identity, cloud, Kubernetes, and on lab environments, partnering with security and infra teams to define telemetry, threat models, and playbooks, while shaping automation to reduce toil.

Qualifications

• Hands-on threat detection and/or incident response experience.
• Understand TTPs and translate into detection strategies.
• Threat modeling mindset for new infrastructure or features.
• Experience in Kubernetes/containerized environments and telemetry.
• Experience across Azure, AWS, GCP, OCI cloud platforms.
• Automation to reduce repetitive D&R work with auditable outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve Detection & Response capabilities across OpenAI’s infrastructure, products, and research environments, with an emphasis on high-signal detection and reliable operational response.
• Engineer detection pipelines and tooling: rule lifecycle management, measurement/quality loops (coverage, precision, latency), tuning processes, and safe rollout patterns.
• Automate response and investigations by building workflows that reduce toil (triage, enrichment, containment, evidence capture) and improve time-to-understand/time-to-contain.
• Partner with other Security teams and system/infrastructure owners across the company to ensure new systems ship with the right telemetry, threat models, and response playbooks from day one.
• Define D&R requirements and drive visibility across endpoints, identity, SaaS, cloud, Kubernetes: identify telemetry/control gaps, prioritize them, and advocate for fixes with partner teams (and implement directly when it’s the fastest/most effective path).
• Evaluate and respond to emergent security concerns in a frontier AI lab environment, such as detection and response strategies for agents operating across infrastructure at scale.

Skills

Threat detection

Incident response

Kubernetes

Cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP, OCI)

Scripting

Agent tooling / automation

Telemetry design

Communication

Tools

Kubernetes

Cloud telemetry

Job description

OpenAI is seeking a Security Engineer on Detection & Response to protect our assets, data, and infrastructure. You will build and operate systems to detect suspicious activity and respond effectively.

You will work across endpoints, identity, cloud, Kubernetes, and on lab environments, partnering with security and infra teams to define telemetry, threat models, and playbooks, while shaping automation to reduce toil.