Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Cyber - SF

Details

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 defending globally critical systems, working closely with Product, Research, and Go-to-Market teams to adapt products and models to customer security needs.

About the Role

Build systems that help defenders operate at scale. This may include helping enterprises identify, test, and deploy patches across hundreds of thousands of code repositories, or helping security teams analyze petabytes of logs for malicious agents and coordinated attacks. You will build tools that customer engineers can trust when making consequential security decisions.

You will work directly with customer security teams, from CISOs to frontline analysts, to determine how defenses should evolve as AI changes attacker behavior. Alongside OpenAI’s account teams, you will translate security priorities into deployed systems and help shape future products by partnering with Research and Product on gaps between defender needs and current model or product capabilities.

The role is based in San Francisco 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 with customer engineers.
• Integrate agents into security workflows, establish access boundaries, and determine which actions require human review.
• Build evaluations based on 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 operating engineers by providing observability and controls to understand system behavior, intervene when necessary, and expand adoption.
• 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 CVE analysis, agent honeypots, and hands-on security investigations.
• Security community engagement with CISOs and frontline practitioners.
• Application security, including CodeQL, Semgrep, fuzzing, and vulnerability disclosure.
• Automated remediation, including tested patches, dependency upgrades, and 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, and cross-account trust.
• Security research, including malware reverse engineering, exploit reproduction, and vulnerability research.
• Agent security, including testing for prompt injection, tool misuse, and credential exposure and building defenses against these risks.

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 flexible spending and commuter accounts.
• 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 as required by law.
• 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.

OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law.