Research Lead, Cyber

Location

San Francisco

Employment Type

Full time

Department

Safety Systems

Compensation

Estimated Base Salary $460K • Offers Equity 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 generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.

• 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.

About the team

The Safety Systems team is responsible for various safety work to ensure our best models can be safely deployed to the real world to benefit the society and is at the forefront of OpenAI's mission to build and deploy safe AGI, driving our commitment to AI safety and fostering a culture of trust and transparency. We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely.

About the role

As the lead researcher for cybersecurity risks, you will design, implement, and oversee an end-to-end mitigation stack to prevent severe cyber misuse across OpenAI’s products. This role demands technical depth, decisive leadership, and cross-company influence to ensure safeguards are enforceable, scalable, and effective. You’ll set the technical strategy, drive execution, and ensure our products cannot be misused for severe harm. In this role, you will:

• 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/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 (e.g., novel exploits, tool-use chains, automated attack workflows) and across product surfaces. You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have a passion for AI safety and are motivated to make cutting-edge AI models safer for real-world use.
• Bring demonstrated experience in deep learning and transformer models.
• Are proficient with frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Possess a strong foundation in data structures,

algorithms, and software engineering principles.

• Are familiar with methods for training and fine-tuning large language models,

including distillation, supervised fine-tuning, and policy optimization.

• Excel at working collaboratively with cross-functional teams across research,

security, policy, product, and engineering.

• Show decisive leadership in high-stakes,

ambiguous environments.

• Have significant experience designing and deploying technical safeguards for abuse prevention,

detection, and enforcement at scale.

• (Nice to have) Bring background knowledge in cybersecurity or adjacent fields.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission,we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices,and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.