Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Cyber - NYC

OpenAI•New York, NY

3d•$185,000 - $300,000•Hybrid

About The Position

OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team builds with customers to bring frontier AI into production. Cyber Forward Deployed Engineers partner with security and engineering teams defending globally critical systems, adapting OpenAI products and models to customer needs in collaboration with Product, Research, and Go-to-Market teams. In this role, you will build systems that help defenders operate at scale, such as tools for deploying patches across large codebases or analyzing extensive log data for signs of malicious activity. You will work directly with customer security teams, from CISOs to frontline analysts, to identify evolving defense needs, prioritize solutions, and validate them with the engineers who will operate them. You will also partner with Research and Product to define and test capabilities when customer needs exceed current model or product capabilities. The role is based in New York and follows a hybrid work model, with three days per week in the office. Relocation assistance is offered, and travel up to 50% is required.

Requirements

At least 5 years of software engineering experience, including building and shipping production software.
Experience protecting production systems through security engineering, infrastructure, SRE, DevOps, or product engineering.
Experience building and evaluating AI agents for software engineering workflows.
Experience with CI/CD pipelines and practices that maintain code quality, reliability, and security.
Ability to navigate unfamiliar codebases and contribute maintainable, production-quality changes.
Ability to communicate technical concepts and trade-offs to engineering teams and senior security stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

Security curiosity and experimentation, such as studying CVE write-ups or building an agent honeypot to test a hypothesis.
Engagement with the security community, including exchanging ideas with security leaders and frontline practitioners.
Application security experience, such as writing CodeQL queries or Semgrep rules, building fuzzing harnesses, or discovering and responsibly disclosing vulnerabilities.
Automated remediation experience, such as building tools that turn security findings into tested patches, dependency upgrades, or configuration changes across large codebases.
Detection engineering experience using tools or languages such as Sigma, YARA, Splunk, or KQL, and testing detections against attacker behavior.
Cloud and identity security experience, including designing cloud IAM architectures or investigating abuse of workload identities, role hierarchies, or cross-account trust.
Security research experience, such as reverse-engineering malware, developing exploit reproductions, or contributing to vulnerability research.
Agent security experience, including testing agents for prompt injection, tool misuse, or credential exposure and building defenses against them.

Responsibilities

Partner with customer security leaders and OpenAI’s Go-to-Market team to scope engagements, establish responsibilities, and define measurable success criteria.
Lead technical design and implementation alongside customer engineers.
Integrate agents into security workflows, establish access boundaries, and determine which actions require human review.
Build evaluations based on defender decisions, including testing patch effectiveness and application behavior, or measuring detection speed and false-positive rates using historical attacks and normal traffic.
Guide production rollouts with the engineers who will operate the systems, providing observability and controls to understand system behavior, intervene when necessary, and expand adoption.
Translate successful approaches across deployments into reusable tools and engineering practices for other defenders.
Identify gaps between defenders’ needs and current models or products, and partner with Research and Product to define, build, and test capabilities.