Engineering Manager, Distillation & Detection Platform

at OpenAI

📍 San Francisco, United States

USD 293,000-385,000 per year

SENIOR

✅ On-site

✅ Relocation

Tech Stack
Tag name is followed by "@" symbol and proficiency level value. About proficiency levels:

1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;

3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;

7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;

10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.

AI Data Pipelines @ 7 Distributed Systems @ 7 Fraud @ 4 Machine Learning Observability @ 7 Security @ 4

Details

About the role

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.

In this role you will:

Responsibilities

Lead a team of software engineers building detection + mitigation systems for frontier model misuse, with an 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.

You might thrive in this role if you:

Requirements

Experience building systems in adversarial, fast-evolving environments
Are comfortable with ambiguity and novelty
Have experience adjacent to security (e.g., abuse prevention, fraud, integrity, platform defense, auth/identity, malware/spam, adversarial environments)
Communicate clearly and build trust quickly with senior stakeholders—pragmatic, collaborative, and calm under scrutiny.
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/Security to ship systems that materially reduce risk or abuse at scale.
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.

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.