Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Cyber - SF

OpenAI•San Francisco, CA

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 that defend globally critical systems, adapting OpenAI products and models to customer security 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 to identify, test, and deploy patches across large codebases or analyze extensive log data for malicious activity. You will work directly with customer security teams, from CISOs to frontline analysts, to assess how their defenses need to evolve, prioritize solutions, and validate systems with the engineers who will operate them. You will also bring customer needs and product gaps to Research and Product teams to help define, build, and test new capabilities. The role is based in San Francisco with a hybrid work model requiring three days in the office per week. Travel up to 50% is required. Relocation assistance is offered.

Requirements

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 investigating CVE write-ups, building agent honeypots, or turning security questions into hands-on experiments.
Engagement with the security community and exchanging ideas with defenders, from CISOs to 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, including tooling that turns security findings into tested patches, dependency upgrades, or configuration changes across large codebases.
Detection engineering experience using tools such as Sigma, YARA, Splunk, or KQL and testing detections against attacker behavior.
Cloud and identity security experience, including cloud IAM architecture and investigating 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.

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 grounded in defender decisions, including testing patch effectiveness and expected application behavior, or measuring detection speed and false-positive rates against 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 needed, and expand adoption.
Translate successful approaches across deployments into reusable tools and engineering practices for other defenders.
Partner with Research and Product to define, build, and test capabilities when customer needs exceed what current models or products can do.