Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) (Cybersecurity)

Location: San Francisco, United States

Salary: $185K–$300K plus equity

Company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company building and safely deploying general-purpose artificial intelligence products.

What you will do

• Partner with customer security leaders and Go-to-Market teams to scope engagements, define responsibilities, and establish measurable success criteria.
• Design and implement systems with customer engineers, including integrating AI agents into security workflows, setting access boundaries, and defining human-review requirements.
• Build evaluations for patching and detection systems using exploit validation, historical attacks, normal traffic, detection speed, and false-positive rates.
• Guide production rollouts by providing observability and controls for system understanding, intervention, and adoption.
• Translate successful deployment approaches into reusable tools and engineering practices.
• Partner with Research and Product to define and build capabilities when current models or products do not meet defender needs.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, including building and shipping production software.
• Experience protecting production systems through security engineering, infrastructure, SRE, DevOps, or product engineering.
• Experience building and evaluating AI agents for software engineering workflows.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and practices supporting code quality, reliability, and security.
• Ability to navigate unfamiliar codebases and contribute maintainable, production-quality changes.
• Ability to communicate technical concepts and trade-offs to engineering teams and senior security stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Application security experience with CodeQL, Semgrep, fuzzing, or responsible vulnerability disclosure.
• Automated remediation experience, including tested patches, dependency upgrades, or configuration changes across large codebases.
• Detection engineering experience with Sigma, YARA, Splunk, or KQL.
• Cloud and identity security experience, including IAM architectures and workload identity, role hierarchy, or cross-account trust abuse.
• Security research experience, including malware reverse engineering, exploit reproduction, or vulnerability research.
• Agent security experience involving prompt injection, tool misuse, credential exposure, and related defenses.
• Security experimentation and community engagement with defenders and security leaders.

Culture & Benefits

• Work directly with customer security teams, from CISOs to frontline analysts, and collaborate with Product, Research, and Go-to-Market teams.
• Employment includes equity.
• OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities.
• Background checks are administered according to applicable law, including applicable US and California fair-chance requirements.