Counsel - AI Safety & Cyber Incident Response

About the Team

OpenAI’s Legal team helps address the cutting-edge legal questions that arise from developing and deploying advanced AI. The Security and Public Sector Legal team helps protect OpenAI’s technology, systems, data, and people and supports the safe and responsible use of our tools. We work closely with technical and operational teams to provide practical advice on novel, consequential, and fast-moving issues.

About the Role

We are seeking a counsel to help lead legal responses to cybersecurity and AI safety incidents. This is an opportunity to bring deep incident response expertise to some of the hardest questions in AI, and help build the legal frameworks and practices for answering them.

You will advise on complex cybersecurity incidents, from discovery through to resolution, and also help develop our response to incidents involving the safety of our models and tools. AI safety incident response is a new and rapidly evolving legal practice area. Your work will help define how frontier AI companies investigate and respond to safety events such as unexpected model behavior, degradation of safeguards, harmful uses of our services, and potential harm to third parties—often where established legal standards do not yet exist. Working directly with Security, Safety, Product, Engineering, and colleagues across Legal, you will advise on consequential decisions where established approaches may offer little guidance.

We are looking for a practical, dynamic lawyer who can turn incomplete information into clear recommendations, exercise sound judgment on novel questions, and follow matters through to resolution. You will help establish the facts, assess risks, and guide investigations, communications, remediation, and reporting. You will also turn lessons from individual incidents into durable response processes, helping further develop a legal function that evolves alongside the technology.

This role is based in Washington, D.C. or San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will be:

• Serving as legal lead on assigned cybersecurity and AI safety incidents, coordinating fact development, legal analysis and advising, cross-functional escalation, and follow-through with the response team.

• Working with investigators to understand incident scope, attack paths, root cause, and affected systems and data, and potential third-party impacts, while helping teams distinguish established facts from gaps in the evidence.

• Managing outside counsel and third party service provider engagements necessary to incident response.

• Serving as key Legal point of contact for cross-functional teams.

• Partnering with Privacy, Product, Regulatory, and other counsel to assess notification and reporting obligations, advise on timely customer and user communications, and coordinate third-party outreach and incident-related information sharing with industry peers and government partners.

• Preparing concise incident updates and decision materials that distinguish established facts, uncertainties, options, and recommended next steps.

• Developing severity-based escalation criteria, response playbooks, exercises, and clear decision and handoff processes for cybersecurity and AI safety incidents, adapting established practices to emerging model risks.

• Supporting post-incident reviews, tracking agreed corrective actions, and turning lessons into practical improvements to safeguards and response processes.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• A JD and a license or qualification to practice law in your jurisdiction.

• 5+ years of relevant experience.

• Relevant legal experience managing cybersecurity or privacy incident responses or comparable complex technology investigations at a technology company, law firm, or government agency, including work with technical teams, other counsel, and communications partners.

• The ability to translate technical findings into practical legal advice, with a working understanding of technical information.

• Sound judgment under time pressure, clear communication of uncertainty, and an understanding of when to act, seek specialist advice, or escalate.

• Clear, concise writing and the ability to keep cross-functional teams aligned through changing facts and competing priorities.

• Ownership of details and follow-through, paired with collaborative work with colleagues who bring different expertise.

• A strong interest in the novel challenges of AI safety and a willingness to help develop new approaches. Direct AI incident experience is helpful; strong transferable incident response skills are welcome.

• Availability to participate in time-sensitive incident response, including occasional work outside normal business hours.

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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