Security Researcher, Security Products

Employment Type

Full time

Department

Security Products

Compensation

• San Francisco$325K – $490K • Offers Equity

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
• 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
• Mental health and wellness support
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
• Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.

This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.

About the Team

Security Products is a new business unit on a mission to transform cybersecurity by leveraging AI to give defenders a decisive advantage. We’re building products that tackle some of the hardest, highest-impact problems in the field. We’re starting with tools that are already proving their value internally, helping to protect our own systems. We operate with speed, purpose, and a deep sense of responsibility, partnering across engineering, research, and security to deliver real-world impact.

About the Role

As a Security Researcher on the Security Products team, you’ll play a key role in developing the science and methods that power our AI-powered cybersecurity products. You’ll work as part of a small team to develop security applications of LLMs to meaningful security problems and bring them to the world. This is a fast-moving, high-impact role where you’ll collaborate closely with security experts, AI researchers, and other engineers to bring advanced AI capabilities into real-world security workflows. You'll help shape not just the product, but also the technical foundation and engineering culture of a rapidly growing team with a critical mission.

You’ll be responsible for:

• Advancing the state of the art in applying LLMs/AI to real-world program analysis, vulnerability analysis, reverse engineering, and secure development problems.
• Designing experiments, benchmarks, and evaluation datasets to measure security efficacy, model robustness, and operator workflow impact.
• Building research prototypes and iterating them into reliable, secure, user-ready product capabilities.
• Partnering with internal and external researchers, teams, and design partners to understand high-value opportunities and use cases.
• Collecting and structuring security data (code, vulnerability data, logs, alerts) for performance benchmarking, model training, fine-tuning, and retrieval workflows.
• Developing and integrating model-driven detections, reasoning agents, and automated workflows into production systems and cloud environments.
• Contributing to team engineering culture, secure development practices, and responsible AI use in security contexts.
• Staying current on emerging threats, attacker tradecraft, and frontier AI techniques; translating insights into impact.

We’re looking for someone with:

• 10+ years of relevant security research experience.
• Proficiency with program analysis techniques, tools, and technologies, including disassemblers (e.g. IDA Pro, Binary Ninja, Ghidra) and fuzzing.
• Proficiency with JavaScript, React, and other web technologies.
• Proficiency in one or more backend programming languages such as Python, Go, or similar.
• Experience with public cloud infrastructure (e.g. Azure, AWS) and orchestration frameworks (e.g. Kubernetes, Terraform).
• Deep understanding of security-related practices, such as secure coding, threat modeling, or detection systems.
• Interest in AI/ML (direct experience not required).
• Ability to move fast in an environment where things are sometimes loosely defined and may have competing priorities or deadlines.

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.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

Compensation Range: $325K - $490K

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