Security Engineer, Detection and Response

Compensation

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts

• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)

• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match

• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)

• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees

• 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)

• Mental health and wellness support

• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage

• Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth

• Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible

• Relocation support for eligible employees

• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

About the Team

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

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.

In this role, you will:

• 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.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• 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.

Additional Information

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.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of