Software Engineer, Cyber Safeguards
OpenAI · San Francisco
About this role
**Software Engineer, Cyber Safeguards** **About the Team** Models are becoming increasingly capable—moving from tools that assist humans to agents that can plan, execute, and adapt in the real world. Mitigating frontier risks from these capabilities is critical to OpenAI’s ability to deploy models safely. The Preparedness team addresses these risks through: - **Measurement:** Monitoring and predicting the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems. - **Mitigation:** Ensuring misalignment safeguards, alignment tools, and preparedness efforts adequately address extreme future threats. - **Coordination:** Setting mitigation targets via OpenAI’s preparedness framework and partnering across teams to achieve them. This is urgent, fast-paced work with far-reaching implications for the company and society. **About the Role** OpenAI is seeking a **very senior, independent Software Engineer** to lead the technical work behind **cyber safeguard infrastructure** in Preparedness. You’ll apply production-grade engineering discipline to systems supporting cyber evaluations and safeguard research internally, and enabling safe deployment externally—working closely with researchers and security partners. You’ll thrive if you can move comfortably between ambiguous research needs and robust, operable systems, and drive work across organizational boundaries with clear communication. **In this role, you will:** - Drive the **technical direction** and **hands-on execution** for cyber safeguard infrastructure. - Establish **production-quality reliability, observability, on-call**, and **SLA/SLO** practices. - Partner across the company (**security, research, policy, and product**) to translate evolving needs into durable platforms. - Lead cross-functional technical work, create alignment, and unblock collaborators. - Build reliable systems supporting cyber evaluations and research workflows. - Improve **scalability, usability, and operational safety** of cyber safeguards. - Mentor teammates and raise the engineering bar while staying deeply hands-on. **You might thrive here if you have:** - Extensive experience owning **large-scale production systems**, including **reliability, on-call, incident response, SLAs/SLOs**, and operational excellence. - Senior/staff-level technical leadership with a track record of driving **ambiguous, cross-functional** work—especially in **cybersecurity**. - Strong hands-on software engineering and systems design skills; ability to go deep into code and architecture, quickly gain context in unfamiliar systems, and make meaningful changes while following existing patterns. - Ability to collaborate closely with researchers and independently turn evolving research needs into robust infrastructure. - Experience thinking and communicating about **cyber capability, misuse risk, access patterns, safeguards, and deployment tradeoffs** in high-stakes environments. - Security company experience supporting cyber evaluations, or building security/reliability infrastructure is a plus. - Experience transitioning from strong engineering into research support is a plus (former engineering managers welcome if still deeply technical and hands-on). **About OpenAI** OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring general-purpose AI benefits all of humanity. OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer. (Additional policy and background check information is included in the original posting.)
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