Offensive Security Engineer

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

We're seeking an exceptional Principal-level Offensive Security Engineer to challenge and strengthen OpenAI's security posture. This role isn't your typical red team job - it's an opportunity to engage broadly and deeply, craft innovative attack simulations, collaborate closely with defensive teams, and influence strategic security improvements across the organization.

You'll have the chance to not only find vulnerabilities but actively drive their resolution, automate offensive techniques with cutting-edge technologies, and use your unique attacker perspective to shape our security strategy.

This role will be primarily focused on continuously testing our agent powered products like codex and operator. These systems are uniquely valuable targets because they’re rapidly evolving, have access to perform sensitive actions on behalf of users, and have large, diverse attack surfaces. You will play a crucial role in securing our agents by hunting for realistic vulnerabilities that emerge from the interactions between the applications, infrastructure, and models that power them.

In This Role You Will

• Continuously hunt for vulnerabilities in the interactions between the applications, infrastructure, and models that power our agentic products.
• Conduct open-scope red and purple team operations, simulating realistic attack scenarios.
• Collaborate proactively with defensive security teams to enhance detection, response, and mitigation capabilities.
• Perform comprehensive penetration testing on our diverse suite of products.
• Leverage advanced automation and OpenAI technologies to optimize your offensive security work.
• Present insightful, actionable findings clearly and compellingly to inspire impactful change.
• Influence security strategy by providing attacker-driven insights into risk and threat modeling.

You Might Thrive In This Role If You Have

• 7+ years of hands-on red team experience or exceptional accomplishments demonstrating equivalent expertise.
• Deep expertise conducting offensive security operations within modern technology companies.
• Experience designing, developing, or testing assessing the security of AI-powered systems.
• Experience working finding, exploiting and mitigating common vulnerabilities in AI systems like prompt injection, leaking sensitive data, confused deputies, and dynamically generated UI components.
• Exceptional skill in code review, identifying novel and subtle vulnerabilities.
• Proven experience performing offensive security assessments in at least one hyperscaler cloud environment (Azure preferred).
• Demonstrated mastery assessing complex technology stacks, including:
  • Highly customized Kubernetes clusters
  • Container environments
  • CI/CD pipelines
  • GitHub security
  • macOS and Linux operating systems
  • Data science tooling and environments
  • Python-based web services
  • React-based frontend applications
• Strong intuitive understanding of trust boundaries and risk assessment in dynamic contexts.
• Excellent coding skills, capable of writing robust tools and automation for offensive operations.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts effectively through compelling storytelling.
• Proven track record of not just finding vulnerabilities but actively contributing to solutions in complex codebases.

Bonus Points

• Background or expertise in AI or data science.
• Prior experience working in tech startups or fast-paced technology environments.
• Experience in related disciplines such as Software Engineering (SWE), Detection Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Security Engineering, or IT Infrastructure.

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.

Key skills/competency

• Red Teaming
• Vulnerability Hunting
• Attack Simulation
• AI Security
• Cloud Security (Azure)
• Penetration Testing
• Kubernetes
• Code Review
• Automation
• Risk Assessment