Threat Detection Engineering Lead

OpenAI, Inc.; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a hands-on technical leader to guide Threat Detection Engineering, protecting research, data, and infrastructure. You will hire and develop engineers, set technical direction, and prioritize risks to OpenAI’s intellectual property, customer data, and critical infrastructure.

Your team will develop agent-first detections and responses, turning model advances into dependable defenses, collaborating with security, research, and infrastructure partners to ensure effective action.

Responsibilities

• Hire, coach, and develop engineers. Set clear expectations, provide regular feedback, grow technical leadership, and build a team that reviews work rigorously and learns from missed detections.
• Set a threat-informed roadmap. Prioritize detection work based on how external and internal actors could target the systems where we train and evaluate frontier models, the production services that run inference and power our products worldwide, the datacenter hardware and networks that support both, and the devices, identities, and applications employees rely on.
• Own detection and investigation as a complete workflow. Embed agent-driven triage and investigation in the detections your team operates.
• Build response and containment capabilities tailored to our infrastructure. Work with infrastructure and system owners to develop and test the controls responders need to contain threats in their environments.
• Apply models across the detection engineering lifecycle. Use OpenAI’s models to help develop threat hypotheses, author and test detections, deploy and tune them, and incorporate investigation findings into better coverage.
• Turn model advances into tested defenses. Prototype new approaches using OpenAI’s models, evaluate them against realistic adversary behavior and analyst baselines, and move successful experiments into production.
• Anticipate emerging threats. Translate adversary intelligence and incident findings into testable detection hypotheses.
• Establish the visibility needed to detect, investigate, and respond. Partner with Security Observability and infrastructure owners to define telemetry and forensic data requirements.
• Engineer for measurable security outcomes. Use replay, adversarial validation, and regression testing to assess whether workflows find intended threats, distinguish benign activity, and reach defensible conclusions.
• Contribute during incidents. The Security Incident Response Team leads formal incident response.

Job description

OpenAI is seeking a hands-on technical leader to guide Threat Detection Engineering, protecting research, data, and infrastructure. You will hire and develop engineers, set technical direction, and prioritize risks to OpenAI’s intellectual property, customer data, and critical infrastructure.

Your team will develop agent-first detections and responses, turning model advances into dependable defenses, collaborating with security, research, and infrastructure partners to ensure effective action.