Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Cyber - SF

Forward Deployed Engineer, Cyber

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company focused on building safe, capable AI systems and bringing them into practical use. The organization works across research, product development, and customer deployment to ensure that advanced AI technologies solve real-world problems responsibly. OpenAI's mission centers on ensuring that powerful AI systems benefit humanity broadly, and the company maintains a strong commitment to safety and human-centered design across all its work.

The Forward Deployed Engineering team at OpenAI embeds engineers directly with customers to integrate frontier AI capabilities into production environments. The Cyber Forward Deployed Engineering group specializes in partnering with security and infrastructure teams that protect critical systems worldwide. In this capacity, Cyber FDEs work across product, research, and go-to-market functions to customize OpenAI's AI tools and models for defensive security use cases.

What you'll do

• Work directly with customer security leaders and OpenAI's account teams to define engagement scope, establish clear responsibilities, and set measurable success metrics for deployments.

• Lead technical architecture and implementation with customer engineering teams, integrating AI agents into existing security workflows, setting access controls, and identifying which decisions require human approval.

• Create and run evaluations tied to actual defender needs. Test whether a patching agent successfully blocks known exploits while preserving application functionality, or validate detection systems by replaying historical attacks against normal traffic to measure speed and false-positive rates.

• Support production deployment alongside the engineers who will operate these systems daily. Build observability tools and controls that help them understand behavior, intervene when needed, and scale adoption confidently.

• Extract lessons from successful deployments into reusable tools, frameworks, and practices that other security teams can adopt.

What you'll bring

• At least 5 years building and shipping production software systems.

• Hands-on experience protecting production systems through security engineering, infrastructure, SRE, DevOps, or product engineering roles.

• Experience designing, building, and evaluating AI agents for software engineering workflows.

• Working knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and practices that ensure code quality, reliability, and security.

• Ability to navigate unfamiliar code repositories and contribute production-grade changes that teams can maintain.

• Skill communicating technical concepts and trade-offs clearly to engineering teams and senior security leadership.

Nice to have

• Background in application security, including writing CodeQL or Semgrep rules, building fuzzing harnesses, or discovering vulnerabilities.

• Hands-on experience with automated remediation and building tools that turn security findings into tested patches across large codebases.

• Familiarity with detection engineering using tools like Sigma, YARA, Splunk, or KQL.

• Experience with cloud and identity security architecture design and investigation of identity abuse.

What they offer

• Hybrid work arrangement requiring 3 days per week in San Francisco office.

• Relocation assistance available.

• Travel up to 50% required for customer engagement.