Data Center Security Engineer

About the Team

Security is foundational to OpenAI’s mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. As OpenAI builds and operates increasingly powerful systems, security helps make that progress durable, trustworthy, and resilient.

The Security team protects OpenAI’s technology, people, and products, but our role goes beyond defense alone. We help enable the infrastructure, research, and product work that powers frontier AI, bringing deep technical judgment and hands-on operational execution to some of the most important systems being built today. Our work is grounded in impact, pragmatism, and preparing for the security challenges that come with increasingly capable technology.

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced and highly technical Data Center Security Engineer to help secure the infrastructure behind OpenAI’s rapidly expanding data center footprint. This is a chance to work on high-consequence systems at the intersection of cybersecurity, critical infrastructure, and advanced AI, where strong technical judgment and careful execution have direct, lasting impact.

In this role, you will operate with substantial agency and ownership alongside a small team of data center security experts, driving security architecture, control validation, and defensive improvements across multiple, diverse environments, with particular emphasis on IT, Enterprise, ICS and Operational Technology (OT) networking. You will help define and raise the security bar for infrastructure programs already in flight while shaping how future deployments are secured from the start.

This role's preferred location is one of our OpenAI offices in San Francisco, Seattle, or New York City and relocation assistance is available. We are also open to considering candidates who are remote.

In this role, you will:

• Design and implement security controls that protect data center infrastructure across a growing global footprint, with particular focus on both OT and IT networking environments.

• Partner closely with a small team of data center security specialists, as well as engineering, operations, and broader security teams, to deliver resilient and practical security outcomes.

• Secure OT and IT networking environments through strong segmentation, access control, monitoring, hardening, and connectivity patterns suited to critical infrastructure.

• Contribute to security architecture and design reviews for data center systems, including OT and IT networking, network segmentation, identity and access management, provisioning workflows, hardware and firmware trust boundaries, and operational safeguards.

• Perform recurring audits, control assessments, and validation activities across OT and IT networking environments to ensure continued compliance against defined controls.

• Drive ongoing evidence collection, gap tracking, and remediation follow-through so control deficiencies are identified quickly and closed durably.

• Help define measurable security standards, control objectives, audit procedures, evidence requirements, and validation mechanisms for infrastructure and facility security programs.

• Support security monitoring, incident response, and post-incident improvement efforts for data center, OT, and IT networking environments.

• Work with suppliers, partners, and internal stakeholders to evaluate and reduce risks associated with third-party hardware, firmware, software, and operational dependencies.

• Continually evolve the security of our data centers alongside changes in adversary activity, infrastructure complexity, and the increasing demands of OpenAI’s systems.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 15+ years of experience in security, including meaningful hands-on experience securing large-scale infrastructure, industrial environments, or data center systems.

• Deep expertise securing OT and IT networking environments in critical infrastructure settings, including segmentation strategies, remote access controls, asset visibility, and compensating controls for operational constraints.

• Experience building audit or assurance programs that validate ongoing compliance with defined security controls, especially across OT and IT networking environments, rather than relying on one-time point-in-time reviews.

• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills including the ability to partner effectively with internal and external stakeholders while operating with a high degree of autonomy.

• Strong knowledge of security engineering and operations across network security, IAM and PAM, hardening, provisioning, monitoring, incident response, and secure lifecycle practices.

• Experience protecting hyperscale, colocation, or hybrid infrastructure environments against sophisticated adversaries.

• Familiarity with control and governance frameworks such as NIST, ISO 27001, or SOC 2, and the ability to translate them into concrete technical and operational requirements.

• The ability to operate as a high-ownership individual contributor who influences through technical judgment, collaboration, and execution.

• Clear written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain risk, controls, and tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical partners.

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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