Lead Research Engineer / Scientist – Cyber

OpenAI

full-time

Posted on: 9/25/2025

Origin: • 🇺🇸 United States • California

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💰 $460,000 per year

Senior

Cyber SecurityPyTorchTensorflow

About the role

Design, implement, and oversee an end-to-end mitigation stack to prevent severe cyber misuse across OpenAI’s products
Lead the full-stack mitigation strategy and implement solutions for model-enabled cybersecurity misuse—from prevention to monitoring, detection, and enforcement
Integrate safeguards across products so protections are consistent, low-latency, and scale with usage and new model surfaces
Make decisive technical trade-offs within the cybersecurity risk domain, balancing coverage, latency, model utility, and user privacy
Partner with risk and threat modeling leadership to align mitigation design with anticipated attacker behaviors and high-impact scenarios
Drive rigorous testing and red-teaming, stress-testing the mitigation stack against evolving threats (novel exploits, tool-use chains, automated attack workflows) and across product surfaces
Set technical strategy, drive execution, and provide cross-company leadership and influence to ensure enforceable, scalable, effective safeguards

Passion for AI safety and motivation to make cutting-edge AI models safer for real-world use
Demonstrated experience in deep learning and transformer models
Proficiency with frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow
Strong foundation in data structures, algorithms, and software engineering principles
Familiarity with methods for training and fine-tuning large language models, including distillation, supervised fine-tuning, and policy optimization
Experience designing and deploying technical safeguards for abuse prevention, detection, and enforcement at scale
Ability to work collaboratively with cross-functional teams across research, security, policy, product, and engineering
Decisive leadership in high-stakes, ambiguous environments
(Nice to have) Background knowledge in cybersecurity or adjacent fields
Ability to work from the US office three days per week (application asks this)
Willingness to provide visa/sponsorship information if applicable (application asks if sponsorship will be required)