Senior Data Scientist for AI-Driven Cybersecurity

OpenAI; United States; On-site; USD 263,000 - 515,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a senior data scientist to define what effective cybersecurity looks like in the age of AI agents. You will measure risks, improve internal security controls, and shape AI-powered security products across Security and Cyber Product teams.

The role requires owning analytics that translate into measurable improvements in protections and product value. You will report into Data Science while partnering with Security, Cyber Product, Engineering, and Research.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in data science, applied research, analytics, or a related quantitative field.
• 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.

Responsibilities

• 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 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. Assess how effectively AI systems identify security issues and support developer and enterprise workflows.
• Develop evaluation systems for security findings. Define quality measures for findings, including accuracy, severity, actionability, duplication, resolution, and downstream impact.
• Understand the complete security workflow. Measure how users discover, investigate, validate, prioritize, and resolve security issues.
• Design rigorous measurement and experimentation strategies. Evaluate new models, security controls, product features, and workflows through controlled experiments and other analyses.
• Translate analysis into security and product strategy. Identify high-value decisions and communicate findings to technical partners and senior leadership.
• Help establish a new security data science capability. Build a focused roadmap and durable operating rhythms across teams.

Skills

Data science

Applied research

Analytics

SQL

Python

Experimentation

Causal inference

Cross-functional

Security

Job description

OpenAI is seeking a senior data scientist to define what effective cybersecurity looks like in the age of AI agents. You will measure risks, improve internal security controls, and shape AI-powered security products across Security and Cyber Product teams.

The role requires owning analytics that translate into measurable improvements in protections and product value. You will report into Data Science while partnering with Security, Cyber Product, Engineering, and Research.