Lead Research Engineer / Scientist, Cyber

OpenAI • San Francisco, CA

94d

About The Position

As the lead researcher for cybersecurity risks, you will design, implement, and oversee an end-to-end mitigation stack to prevent severe cyber misuse across OpenAI’s products. This role demands technical depth, decisive leadership, and cross-company influence to ensure safeguards are enforceable, scalable, and effective. You’ll set the technical strategy, drive execution, and ensure our products cannot be misused for severe harm.

Requirements

• Have a passion for AI safety and are motivated to make cutting-edge AI models safer for real-world use.
• Bring demonstrated experience in deep learning and transformer models.
• Are proficient with frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Possess a strong foundation in data structures, algorithms, and software engineering principles.
• Are familiar with methods for training and fine-tuning large language models, including distillation, supervised fine-tuning, and policy optimization.
• Excel at working collaboratively with cross-functional teams across research, security, policy, product, and engineering.
• Show decisive leadership in high-stakes, ambiguous environments.
• Have significant experience designing and deploying technical safeguards for abuse prevention, detection, and enforcement at scale.

Nice To Haves

• Bring background knowledge in cybersecurity or adjacent fields.

Responsibilities

• Lead the full-stack mitigation strategy and implement solutions for model-enabled cybersecurity misuse—from prevention to monitoring, detection, and enforcement.
• Integrate safeguards across products so protections are consistent, low-latency, and scale with usage and new model surfaces.
• Make decisive technical trade-offs within the cybersecurity risk domain, balancing coverage, latency, model utility, and user privacy.
• Partner with risk/threat modeling leadership to align mitigation design with anticipated attacker behaviors and high-impact scenarios.
• Drive rigorous testing and red-teaming, stress-testing the mitigation stack against evolving threats (e.g., novel exploits, tool-use chains, automated attack workflows) and across product surfaces.

What This Job Offers

• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees