Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Cyber - NYC

Details

OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team builds with customers to bring frontier AI into production. Cyber FDEs partner with security and engineering teams that defend globally critical systems, from enterprise software to the core infrastructure it runs on. They work closely with Product, Research, and Go-to-Market teams to adapt products and models to customer security needs.

The role involves building systems that help defenders identify, test, and deploy patches across hundreds of thousands of code repositories, analyze petabytes of logs for malicious agents or coordinated attacks, and support consequential security decisions. The engineer will work directly with customer security teams, from CISOs to frontline analysts, and help define, build, and validate new capabilities with Research and Product teams.

This role is based in New York City and follows a hybrid work model requiring three days in the office per week. Travel of up to 50% is required.

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 patching agents against known exploits and measuring detection speed and false-positive rates using historical attacks and normal traffic.
• Guide production rollouts with the engineers operating the systems.
• Provide observability and controls to help teams understand system behavior, intervene when necessary, and expand adoption with confidence.
• Translate successful approaches across deployments into reusable tools and engineering practices.

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.

Additional Experience

Relevant experience may include:

• Security experimentation, including analyzing CVE write-ups, building agent honeypots, and turning security questions into hands-on experiments.
• Security community engagement with CISOs and frontline security practitioners.
• Application security, including CodeQL queries, Semgrep rules, fuzzing harnesses, and vulnerability disclosure.
• Automated remediation, including tooling that turns security findings into tested patches, dependency upgrades, or configuration changes across large codebases.
• Detection engineering using Sigma, YARA, Splunk, or KQL.
• Cloud and identity security, including cloud IAM architectures and investigation of workload identities, role hierarchies, or cross-account trust.
• Security research, including malware reverse engineering, exploit reproduction, or vulnerability research.
• Agent security, including testing for prompt injection, tool misuse, or credential exposure and building defenses against them.

Benefits

• Base salary of $185,000–$300,000 per year.
• Equity and performance-related bonuses for eligible employees.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health, dependent care, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, company holidays, office closures, and paid sick or safe time.
• Mental health and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily office meals and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional benefits may include charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.