--- title: 'Security Engineer, Detection and Response at OpenAI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/security-engineer-detection-and-response-openai-san-francisco-fwb9a28gx5qj' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-10' --- # Security Engineer, Detection and Response at OpenAI - **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai) - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $266k–$385k - **Employment:** full-time - **Posted:** 2026-01-28 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/f956b77c-3cc5-4fdd-9463-2a6e5047e57c/application **Skills:** Threat detection, Incident response, Threat modeling, Kubernetes, Containerized environments, Cloud platforms, Azure, AWS, GCP, OCI, Scripting, AI/agent tooling > Build and operate detection and response systems across endpoints, cloud, and infrastructure to protect OpenAI's assets. Engineer detection pipelines, automate responses, and define requirements for telemetry and playbooks while collaborating with security teams. ## Job description ## 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 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. 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. For additional information, please see [OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf). 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 a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through [this form](https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA). No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this [link](https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241). [OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf) At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology. ## About OpenAI ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. - **Entity Type**: Private – structured as a nonprofit parent (OpenAI Foundation) governing a for-profit public benefit corporation (OpenAI Group). The company has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, signaling a potential future IPO. - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA - **Founded**: 2015 - **Founders**: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and others ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence research and deployment - **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises via API and platform), B2C (ChatGPT users), and developers (API, open-source models) - **Mission**: To ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity. ## Products & Services - **[ChatGPT](https://openai.com/chatgpt)**: Conversational AI assistant available via web and mobile, used by consumers and integrated into enterprise workflows. - **[GPT-4 API](https://openai.com/product)**: Large language model accessed via API for developers to build AI-powered applications (text generation, summarization, code assistance, etc.). - **[DALL-E](https://openai.com/dall-e-3)**: Image generation model that creates images from natural language descriptions. - **[Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper)**: Open-source speech recognition system. - **[OpenAI Agents](https://openai.com/)**: Emerging product category focused on autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks on behalf of users (announced June 2026). ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed in the provided sources. Widely reported in the press at ~$300 billion as of early 2026 (post-funding round), but this figure is not confirmed by OpenAI’s official materials. - **Key Metric**: Total funding exceeds $13 billion from Microsoft and other investors. The company has also confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC (see [openai.com](https://openai.com/) – “Confidential submission of draft S-1”). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Microsoft (strategic partner and largest investor), with additional participation from Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others. - **Growth Signals**: Active hiring with 721 open roles posted; expansion into agent-based products; confidential IPO filing; continued deployment of frontier models. ## Competitive Advantages - **First-mover & brand recognition**: ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, establishing OpenAI as the household name in generative AI. - **Research leadership**: Consistently publishes cutting-edge research (GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Whisper, etc.) and attracts top AI talent. - **Compute & infrastructure**: Exclusive partnership with Microsoft provides massive cloud computing resources (Azure) for training and inference. - **Unique governance structure**: The nonprofit parent ensures mission alignment (AGI benefiting humanity) while the for-profit arm can raise capital and scale products. ## Strategic Focus - **Safe AGI development**: Continued emphasis on safety research, alignment, and responsible deployment (e.g., safety systems, model provenance). - **Enterprise expansion**: Growing ChatGPT Enterprise and API offerings for businesses. - **Agentic AI**: Building autonomous agents that can “transform work” (announced June 2026). - **IPO preparation**: Confidential S-1 filing indicates intent to go public, which will require increased financial transparency and governance maturity. ## Why Work Here - **Culture & values**: OpenAI’s stated values include “Humanity first,” “Act with humility,” “Feel the AGI,” and “Ship joy.” Operating principles emphasize agency, creativity, rapid iteration, and intense focus. - **Benefits**: Competitive health insurance, mental healthcare support, 24-week paid birth-parent leave (plus 20 weeks for other parents), generous PTO, annual learning & development stipend, daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), and a domestic conference budget. - **Work environment**: Hybrid/office-based (San Francisco headquarters). The company offers a residency program for researchers and engineers transitioning into AI. - **Impact**: Employees work directly on frontier AI models that shape the industry and society. The mission-driven nature attracts talent passionate about AGI’s societal implications. ## Sources 1. [OpenAI About Page](https://openai.com/about/) 2. [OpenAI Careers Page](https://openai.com/careers/) 3. [OpenAI Job Search](https://openai.com/careers/search) 4. [OpenAI Homepage](https://openai.com/) ## Other roles at OpenAI - [Account Director, Digital Natives](https://feeny.ai/job/account-director-digital-natives-openai-delhi-w85camznm9da) — Delhi, India - [Product Designer, Youth](https://feeny.ai/job/product-designer-youth-openai-san-francisco-y2ejwx2gxsn1) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Manager, EHS - Robotics](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-manager-ehs-robotics-openai-san-francisco-562ppxrm3e6n) — San Francisco, CA - [Hardware Strategic Sourcing Manager, Optics](https://feeny.ai/job/hardware-strategic-sourcing-manager-optics-openai-san-francisco-vrghp3x83twa) — San Francisco, CA - [Research Program Manager, Governance](https://feeny.ai/job/research-program-manager-governance-openai-san-francisco-t9jpag8tgexs) — San Francisco, CA - [Partnerships Operations Lead, OAI for Government](https://feeny.ai/job/partnerships-operations-lead-oai-for-government-openai-washington-vzejrcam99mr) — Washington, DC - [Technical Program Manager, Manufacturing Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-program-manager-manufacturing-operations-openai-singapore-2px9t2t2dyvy) — Singapore - [Creative Director, Copy](https://feeny.ai/job/creative-director-copy-openai-new-york-jd7jgsad5xr4) — New York, NY - [Engineering Manager, ChatGPT Search Infrastructure](https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-manager-chatgpt-search-infrastructure-openai-san-francisco-hh32vszf6wmn) — San Francisco, CA - [Physical Design Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/physical-design-engineer-forward-deployed-engineering-openai-san-francisco-qqh4c31zzvj5) — San Francisco, CA