Incident Commander, Detection & Response - US

About the Team

Security is at 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 an Incident Commander on Detection & Response, you’ll lead the response to complex security incidents affecting OpenAI’s intellectual property, customer data, and infrastructure. You’ll establish response priorities, coordinate technical work streams, drive containment and recovery decisions within agreed authority, and keep stakeholders informed as facts evolve. You’ll work with security and infrastructure teams across endpoints, identity, cloud, and compute environments, maintaining clear ownership and effective handoffs across time zones. Detection engineering knowledge is a supporting requirement: you’ll use telemetry and detection logic to assess evidence, identify visibility gaps, and guide improvements that make incident response more effective.

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.

Requirements

• Have personally led complex security incidents as incident commander or an equivalent response lead, with clear examples of decisions, delegation, escalation, and outcomes.
• Make sound decisions with incomplete information and revise them as evidence changes, balancing containment urgency with operational impact.
• Coordinate responders across teams and time zones, resolve conflicting priorities, and maintain clear ownership during handoffs.
• Communicate calmly and precisely under pressure, including concise stakeholder updates and explicit statements of uncertainty.
• Have the security and infrastructure fundamentals to challenge investigation findings and assess containment and recovery options.
• Understand detection engineering, including telemetry coverage, detection logic, false positives and false negatives, and validation. Can query and interpret evidence to support response decisions.
• Turn incident lessons into practical improvements to readiness, playbooks, detection coverage, and response tooling.

Benefits

OpenAI is 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.