Security Researcher, Agentic AI Threats

About the team

Preparedness is a critical Safety Research team at OpenAI, which is focused on mitigating AI threats to global security that could scale to an extreme level of severity.

Our work involves:

• Measurement. Monitoring and predicting the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems.
• Mitigation. Keeping misuse safeguards, alignment tools, and security measures on track to adequately address extreme threats that might arise in the future.
• Coordination. Setting mitigation targets by maintaining OpenAI’s preparedness framework, and partnering with other staff to achieve these targets.

This is urgent, fast-paced work that has far-reaching implications for the company and for society.

About the role

As AI agents become more capable at software engineering, and automate more of our internal work, they could become a dangerous cyber threat. People in this role will help OpenAI prepare for security threats from advanced AI agent insiders.

In this role, you will:

• Identify paths by which capable future internal AI agents could compromise OpenAI.
• Design security controls - focusing on measures with long lead times that benefit from advanced preparation.
• Stress-test defenses with AI agent evaluations and penetration tests

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Are deeply technical across security and modern infrastructure, and are comfortable digging into the details of operating systems, cloud, containers, CI/CD, or distributed systems.
• Have strong software engineering skills and enjoy building prototypes yourself.
• Are interested in engaging with stakeholders and can do so effectively.
• Bonus: have experience securing cloud infrastructure, and are deeply familiar with core components of the AI stack.

Compensation Range: $293K - $405K USD

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.

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