Security Preparedness Lead, Coding Agents

Details

About the team

Preparedness is a critical Safety Research team at OpenAI, which is focused on mitigating AI threats to global security that could scale to an extreme level of severity.

Our work involves:

• Measurement. Monitoring and predicting the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems.
• Mitigation. Keeping misuse safeguards, alignment tools, and security measures on track to adequately address extreme threats that might arise in the future.
• Coordination. Setting mitigation targets by maintaining OpenAI’s preparedness framework, and partnering with other staff to achieve these targets.

This is urgent, fast-paced work that has far-reaching implications for the company and for society.

About the role

The stakes of securing OpenAI increases as our internal coding and research becomes increasingly driven by autonomous AI agents. Compromising these agents could allow a cyber threat actor to compromise many other parts of the company.

In this role, you would lead Preparedness work defending the security of our internal AI agents against insiders, Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), or powerful AI agents. We’re looking for a strong hands-on technical executor with experience working directly with advanced cyber threat actors.

In this role, you will:

• Develop and maintain threat models via which advanced attackers could compromise our coding assistants and automated security systems.
• Identify security investments that are especially critical to make in advance; for example, prioritizing by implementation lead-times, costs, and benefit.
• Partner with Security, Infrastructure, Research, Legal, and Preparedness to align on implementation plans and tradeoffs.
• Lead technical execution directly when needed, including prototyping controls, writing and reviewing software, and coordinating engineers across teams.
• Work with penetration testers to close gaps in defenses.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Are an exceptional hands-on technical executor.
• Have worked with advanced persistent threat actors, or other capable cyberoffensive groups.
• Can creatively reason about non-standard security problems and design workable controls under tight constraints.
• Have led technical programs or teams.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates.

Benefits

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws.

In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes:

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus 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 multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
• Mental health and wellness support
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
• Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided

More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.

This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.