Engineering Manager, Distillation & Dectection Platform

Details

We’re looking for an engineering manager to lead a team building software systems that detect and prevent harmful misuse of frontier AI models—before incidents occur. This is a builder’s role: you’ll lead engineers shipping production services, detection pipelines, and mitigation mechanisms that protect frontier model integrity and reduce high-severity misuse risk.

While this work intersects with frontier model development, security and risk, we’re explicitly seeking someone with a software engineering foundation who is comfortable building reliable systems that can operate at billions of users scale.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of software engineers building detection and mitigation systems for frontier model misuse, with emphasis on model IP protection / distillation detection and emerging risk surfaces from autonomous agents.
• Set the technical roadmap and execution strategy: prioritize, design, ship, iterate, measure impact.
• Build production systems: services, pipelines, tooling, instrumentation, and automation that scale with frontier model usage.
• Partner deeply with Research and Product to translate evolving model capabilities into concrete tests, signals, and mitigations that can be deployed at scale.
• Drive strong engineering fundamentals: architecture, reliability, monitoring, performance, and operational excellence.
• Hire and grow an exceptional team across backend, data systems, and applied ML engineering domains as needed.
• Anticipate what breaks at scale as agentic workflows become more capable.

Requirements

• Significant experience leading engineering teams and delivering production systems end-to-end.
• Strong technical judgment in system design, distributed systems, data pipelines, observability, and operational reliability.
• Demonstrated ability to partner cross-functionally with Research, Product, and Security to ship systems that materially reduce risk or abuse at scale.
• Experience building systems in adversarial, fast-evolving environments; comfortable with ambiguity and novelty.
• Experience adjacent to security (e.g., abuse prevention, fraud, integrity, platform defense, auth/identity, malware/spam, adversarial environments).
• Familiarity with model extraction / distillation, adversarial evaluation, or scalable detection/mitigation approaches.
• Background in autonomy, high-scale real-time systems, or intelligence-adjacent technical domains is a plus.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts: Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), 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 office closures.
• Mental health and wellness support; employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend; daily meals in offices and meal delivery credits as eligible.
• Relocation support for eligible employees; additional taxable fringe benefits (charitable donation matching, wellness stipends).

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company emphasizes safety, diverse perspectives, and provides equal employment opportunity. Background checks will be administered in accordance with applicable law for applicants.