Incident Commander - Detection & Response

About the Team

Security is at the foundation of OpenAI’s mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

The Security team protects OpenAI’s technology, people, and products. We are technical in what we build but are operational in how we do our work, and are committed to supporting all products and research at OpenAI. Our Security team tenets include: prioritizing for impact, enabling researchers, preparing for future transformative technologies, and engaging a robust security culture.

About the Role

As an Incident Commander on Detection & Response, you’ll lead the response to complex security incidents affecting OpenAI’s intellectual property, customer data, and infrastructure. You’ll establish response priorities, coordinate technical work streams, drive containment and recovery decisions within agreed authority, and keep stakeholders informed as facts evolve. You’ll work with security and infrastructure teams across endpoints, identity, cloud, and compute environments, maintaining clear ownership and effective handoffs across time zones. Detection engineering knowledge is a supporting requirement: you’ll use telemetry and detection logic to assess evidence, identify visibility gaps, and guide improvements that make incident response more effective.

In this role, you will:

• Run incident command from initial assessment through containment, recovery, and closure, establishing severity, scope, response objectives, and escalation needs.

• Assign work stream owners and coordinate investigation, containment, and recovery in parallel. Maintain a decision log and distinguish confirmed facts from assumptions.

• Drive timely containment and recovery decisions with the appropriate owners, weighing security risk, evidence preservation, and operational impact within agreed decision rights.

• Communicate incident status, impact, uncertainty, actions underway, and the next update to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.

• Manage cross-time-zone handoffs with explicit command ownership, current status, outstanding risks, pending decisions, and next actions.

• Improve response readiness through exercises, playbooks, and post-incident reviews; track agreed corrective actions with their owners.

• Partner with detection engineers to evaluate telemetry and detection quality, close incident-related visibility gaps, and prioritize practical response automation.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have personally led complex security incidents as incident commander or an equivalent response lead, with clear examples of decisions, delegation, escalation, and outcomes.

• Make sound decisions with incomplete information and revise them as evidence changes, balancing containment urgency with operational impact.

• Coordinate responders across teams and time zones, resolve conflicting priorities, and maintain clear ownership during handoffs.

• Communicate calmly and precisely under pressure, including concise stakeholder updates and explicit statements of uncertainty.

• Have the security and infrastructure fundamentals to challenge investigation findings and assess containment and recovery options.

• Understand detection engineering, including telemetry coverage, detection logic, false positives and false negatives, and validation. Can query and interpret evidence to support response decisions.

• Turn incident lessons into practical improvements to readiness, playbooks, detection coverage, and response tooling.

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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