Cyber Operations Lead in San Francisco

About the Team OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. Our Communications team includes External Communications, Internal Communications, and other strategic communications functions. This team’s ethos is to support OpenAI’s mission and goals by clearly and authentically explaining our technology, values, and approach to safely building powerful AI. About the Role We’re looking for a senior communications leader to shape how OpenAI communicates about cybersecurity. This person will define the global narrative, lead communications for major product, research, and business milestones, and build sustained programs that explain how OpenAI is helping advance cyber defense while managing the risks created by increasingly capable models. The role will connect OpenAI’s work across cybersecurity products and capabilities, responsible deployment, threat intelligence, enterprise security, research, and public policy. You will work closely with Security, Product, Research, Preparedness, Safety, Global Affairs, Go-to-Market, Legal, and Marketing to anticipate opportunities and risks, develop coordinated communications, and build trust with security practitioners, customers, policymakers, and the public. This is both a strategic and hands-on role. The right person will be comfortable defining a long-term communications strategy, building the systems and relationships needed to execute it, and personally leading through major launches, technical disclosures, and fast-moving issues. This role reports to the Head of Communications, Business and is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days per week in the office and offer relocation assistance. In this role, you will: Define and lead communications strategy for OpenAI’s cybersecurity work, from global narrative development through launches, research, threat reporting, and sustained storytelling. Build a clear, differentiated story about how OpenAI can

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 The stakes of securing OpenAI increases as our internal coding and research becomes increasingly driven by autonomous AI agents. Compromising these agents could allow a cyber threat actor to compromise many other parts of the company. In this role, you would lead Preparedness work defending the security of our internal AI agents against insiders, Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), or powerful AI agents. We’re looking for a strong hands-on technical executor with experience working directly with advanced cyber threat actors. In this role, you will: Develop and maintain threat models via which advanced attackers could compromise our coding assistants and automated security systems. Identify security investments that are especially critical to make in advance; for example, prioritizing by implementation lead-times, costs, and benefit. Partner with Security, Infrastructure, Research, Legal, and Preparedness to align on implementation plans and tradeoffs. Lead technical execution directly when needed, including prototyping controls, writing and reviewing software, and coordinating engineers across teams. Work with penetration testers to close gaps in defenses. You might thrive in this role if you: Are an exceptional hands-on technical executor. Have worked with advanced

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 Models are becoming increasingly capable—moving from tools that assist humans to agents that can plan, execute, and adapt in the real world. 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 util