About the job
About the Role
OpenAI is seeking a dynamic Engineering Manager to spearhead a team dedicated to creating innovative software systems that proactively detect and mitigate the misuse of cutting-edge AI models. In this pivotal role, you will be at the forefront of building production services, detection pipelines, and preventive mechanisms that safeguard the integrity of our frontier models while minimizing the risk of high-severity misuse.
This position is primarily focused on system development; therefore, we are looking for a candidate with a robust software engineering background who is adept at constructing reliable systems capable of scaling to billions of users.
Your Responsibilities:
- Lead a team of skilled software engineers in designing and developing detection and mitigation systems aimed at preventing frontier model misuse, particularly focusing on model intellectual property protection and distillation detection.
- Establish the technical roadmap and execution strategy: prioritize tasks, design solutions, implement them, iterate based on feedback, and measure impact.
- Develop scalable production systems: services, pipelines, tooling, instrumentation, and automation that align with the usage of frontier models.
- Collaborate closely with Research and Product teams to translate evolving model capabilities into actionable tests, signals, and mitigations deployable at scale.
- Champion strong engineering principles: architecture design, system reliability, performance monitoring, and operational excellence.
- Recruit and nurture an exceptional team across backend systems, data engineering, and applied machine learning domains.
- Anticipate potential failures at scale as agentic workflows become increasingly sophisticated.
Ideal Candidate Profile:
- Experience in building systems within adversarial and rapidly changing environments.
- Comfortable navigating ambiguity and novel situations.
- Familiarity with security-related domains (e.g., abuse prevention, fraud detection, platform defense, authentication/identity, and managing adversarial environments).
- Ability to communicate effectively and build trust with senior stakeholders—demonstrating a pragmatic, collaborative approach while remaining composed under scrutiny.
- Proven track record of leading engineering teams and delivering production systems from inception to deployment.
- Strong technical acumen in system design, distributed architectures, data pipelines, and operational observability.
