Principal Software Engineer, Codex Cyber

About the Team

Our Cyber team builds AI systems and products that help trusted defenders understand and respond to cyber threats while improving the safety and reliability of frontier models in security-sensitive settings.

The team works across product engineering, model training, evaluations, safeguards, and deployment to make advanced cyber capabilities useful to defenders and responsibly managed. We collaborate closely with Safety/Preparedness, Research, Security, Legal, Communications, GTM, and external partners across OpenAI’s broader cyber work.

About the Role

We’re looking for research and software engineers to join Codex Cyber. You’ll help define and ship security products, work with trusted defenders and customers, shape model training and access patterns, and build research and evaluation systems for assessing cyber capabilities, validating safeguards, and improving training data. This role is hands-on and cross-functional, connecting product launches, model development, safety work, and real-world security use cases.

In this role, you will:

• Help define and execute the technical roadmap for Codex Cyber’s security products, including evaluations, safeguards, trusted-defender workflows, and deployment decisions.
• Work with trusted defenders, customers, and partner teams to understand cyber use cases, evaluate risk, and turn feedback into product and research priorities.
• Shape cyber-specific model training and access patterns, including data, evaluations, validation, and deployment criteria.
• Build and validate systems for measuring cyber capabilities, monitoring misuse risk, and proving safeguards work in practice.
• Collaborate with Safety/Preparedness, Research, Security, Legal, Communications, Go-to-Market, and external partners on company-wide cyber priorities.
• Translate frontier cyber research into launch-ready tools, operational playbooks, and durable infrastructure for Codex and security products.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Enjoy 0 -> 1 environments, can navigate ambiguity, are excited to build security products that bring frontier AI capabilities to trusted defenders responsibly.
• Can move fluidly between product launches, customer and defender partnerships, model training, evaluation science, and security research.
• Have 10+ years of experience in Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, or similar languages, with the judgment to build reliable systems in ambiguous, high-stakes domains.
• Think clearly about cyber capability, misuse risk, access patterns, safeguards, and deployment tradeoffs in high-stakes environments.
• Have experience in ML systems, security products, cyber evaluations, model training, safety engineering, or trusted customer deployments.

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.

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.