Researcher, Frontier Cybersecurity Risks

About The Team

Preparedness is a critical Safety Research team at OpenAI, focusing on mitigating AI threats to global security. Our work involves measurement, monitoring, and predicting the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems. It also includes mitigation, keeping misuse safeguards, alignment tools, and security measures aligned to address extreme threats, and coordination, setting mitigation targets through OpenAI’s preparedness framework and collaborating with other staff.

About The Role

Models are becoming increasingly capable, moving from tools that assist humans to agents that can plan, execute, and adapt in the real world. As we advance towards AGI, cybersecurity becomes one of the most important and urgent frontiers. As a Researcher for cybersecurity risks, you will help design and implement an end-to-end mitigation stack to reduce severe cyber misuse across OpenAI's products. This role requires strong technical depth and close cross-functional collaboration to ensure safeguards are enforceable, scalable, and effective. You’ll contribute directly to building protections that remain robust as products, model capabilities, and attacker behaviors evolve.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement mitigation components for model-enabled cybersecurity misuse, spanning prevention, monitoring, detection, and enforcement under the guidance of senior technical and risk leadership.
• Integrate safeguards across product surfaces in partnership with product and engineering teams, helping ensure protections are consistent, low-latency, and scale with usage and new model capabilities.
• Evaluate technical trade-offs within the cybersecurity risk domain (coverage, latency, model utility, and user privacy) and propose pragmatic, testable solutions.
• Collaborate closely with risk and threat modeling partners to align mitigation design with anticipated attacker behaviors and high-impact misuse scenarios.
• Execute rigorous testing and red-teaming workflows, helping stress-test the mitigation stack against evolving threats (e.g., novel exploits, tool-use chains, automated attack workflows) and across different product surfaces—then iterate based on findings.

Requirements

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, proficiency with frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow, a 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, and 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.

Qualifications

Qualified candidates should have a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or a related field, with a minimum of 5 years of relevant experience. Experience with large-scale machine learning systems, cybersecurity, and ethical considerations is highly desirable. Strong communication skills and the ability to work effectively in a collaborative environment are essential.

Skills

Strong technical depth in deep learning and transformer models, proficiency with frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow, a solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, and software engineering principles, experience with large-scale machine learning systems, cybersecurity, and ethical considerations, and the ability to collaborate effectively in a cross-functional team setting.

Benefits

OpenAI offers a competitive salary, comprehensive benefits package, and opportunities for professional growth and development. We are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone feels valued and respected.

Pay

The starting salary range for this position is $120,000 - $180,000 annually, depending on experience and qualifications.

Schedule

This is a full-time position with standard business hours.

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. 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. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link. OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.