Researcher, Frontier Cybersecurity Risks

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 the frontier risks resulting from these capabilities is paramount to OpenAI’s ability to continue deploying models safely.

The Preparedness team is dedicated to addressing these critical risks. Our work includes:

1. Measurement. Monitoring and predicting the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems.

2. Mitigation. Keeping misuse and misalignment safeguards, alignment tools, and security measures on track to adequately address extreme threats that might arise in the future.

3. 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 we push toward AGI, cybersecurity becomes one of the most important and urgent frontiers: the same systems that can accelerate productivity can also accelerate exploitation.

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.

In this role, you will:

• 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.

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.

• 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. 

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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