Senior Incident Commander - Security & Response

OpenAI, Inc.; United States; Remote; USD 190,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking an Incident Commander on Detection & Response to lead responses to complex security incidents affecting OpenAI’s IP, customer data, and infrastructure. You will establish priorities, coordinate technical work streams, and drive containment and recovery decisions with defined authority.

You’ll work with security and infrastructure teams across endpoints, identity, cloud, and compute environments, maintaining clear ownership and effective handoffs across time zones.

Qualifications

• Experience leading complex security incidents as incident commander or equivalent.
• Ability to make decisions with incomplete information.
• Strong coordination across time zones and teams.
• Excellent communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Run incident command from initial assessment through containment, recovery, and closure, establishing severity, scope, response objectives, and escalation needs.
• Assign work stream owners and coordinate investigation, containment, and recovery in parallel. Maintain a decision log and distinguish confirmed facts from assumptions.
• Drive timely containment and recovery decisions with the appropriate owners, weighing security risk, evidence preservation, and operational impact within agreed decision rights.
• Communicate incident status, impact, uncertainty, actions underway, and the next update to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
• Manage cross-time-zone handoffs with explicit command ownership, current status, outstanding risks, pending decisions, and next actions.
• Improve response readiness through exercises, playbooks, and post-incident reviews; track agreed corrective actions with their owners.
• Partner with detection engineers to evaluate telemetry and detection quality, close incident-related visibility gaps, and prioritize practical response automation.

Skills

Incident management

Security operations

Leadership

Cross-team coordination

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Job description

OpenAI is seeking an Incident Commander on Detection & Response to lead responses to complex security incidents affecting OpenAI’s IP, customer data, and infrastructure. You will establish priorities, coordinate technical work streams, and drive containment and recovery decisions with defined authority.

You’ll work with security and infrastructure teams across endpoints, identity, cloud, and compute environments, maintaining clear ownership and effective handoffs across time zones.