Security Engineer, Detection and Response

OpenAI; United States; On-site; USD 293,000 - 385,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a Security Engineer for Detection & Response to protect our assets across endpoints, identity, cloud, and data centers. You will collaborate with security teams to define telemetry, threat models, and response playbooks, building tooling that reduces toil while increasing visibility and rapid containment.

You will work in Kubernetes and cloud environments, designing telemetry, automation, and agent-based workflows to accelerate investigations and scale security operations

Qualifications

• Have hands-on threat detection and/or incident response experience, including building detections, running investigations, and improving operational playbooks.
• Understand modern adversary tradecraft and translate into practical detection strategies and response actions.
• Bring a threat-modeling mindset for infrastructure features and telemetry needs.

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve Detection & Response capabilities across OpenAI's infrastructure, products, and research environments.
• Engineer detection pipelines and tooling, including rule lifecycle management and tuning processes.
• Automate response and investigations by building workflows that reduce toil and improve time-to-understand.

Skills

Threat detection

Incident response

Kubernetes

Cloud platforms

Automation

Agent tooling

Tools

Telemetry

Detection pipelines

Job description

About the Team

Security is the foundation of OpenAI's mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

The Security team protects OpenAI's technology, people, and products. We are technical in what we build but are operational in how we do our work, and are committed to supporting all products and research at OpenAI. Our Security team tenets include: prioritizing for impact, enabling researchers, preparing for future transformative technologies, and engaging a robust security culture.

About the Role

As a Security Engineer on Detection & Response, you\'ll help protect OpenAI\'s most sensitive assets— including our intellectual property, customer data, and the infrastructure that supports them— by building and operating the systems we use to detect suspicious activity and respond effectively when it matters. You\'ll work across endpoints, identity, cloud, hyperscale compute infrastructure, and datacenter-adjacent layers, partnering closely with security teams and infrastructure owners to define the telemetry and response requirements we need and building tooling and automation where it delivers the most leverage.

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: develop 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.

Qualifications / You Might Thrive

• Have hands-on threat detection and/or incident response experience, including building detections, running investigations, and improving operational playbooks.

• Understand modern adversary tradecraft (TTPs) and can translate it into practical detection strategies and response actions.

• Bring a threat modeling mindset. You can evaluate new infrastructure or features, identify D&R implications (what could go wrong, what we\'d need to see, how we\'d respond), and turn that into concrete requirements for teams shipping the system.

• Have experience working in Kubernetes/containerized environments, including building detections from cluster telemetry and understanding common failure and attack modes (workloads, nodes, control plane, networking).

• Are comfortable reasoning about lower-level infrastructure and datacenter risks, such as firmware/BMC surfaces, network segmentation/telemetry, and hard-to-observe control paths.

• Have experience across major cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP, OCI), and can design cloud-agnostic detection approaches where possible.

• Like building automation that replaces repetitive D&R work, including thoughtfully using agent-style workflows where they meaningfully reduce toil, while keeping outcomes measurable, auditable, and safe.

• Are energized by new problem areas at a forward-leaning technology company: e.g., thinking through how to detect and respond to agents operating across systems at scale, and turning those ideas into pragmatic telemetry and response requirements.

• Communicate clearly and collaborate well across teams. You can translate D&R needs into clear requirements, align stakeholders, and drive follow-through across technical and non-technical audiences.

• Are comfortable with scripting and enjoy using AI/agent tooling to accelerate investigations and automation—more "directing" than doing everything by hand.

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.

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Compensation

Compensation Range: $293K - $385K