Summary

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.

Job description

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.

Requirements

Personally led complex security incidents as incident commander or equivalent response lead
Make sound decisions with incomplete information and revise as evidence changes
Coordinate responders across teams and time zones and resolve conflicting priorities
Communicate calmly and precisely under pressure
Security and infrastructure fundamentals
Understanding of detection engineering including telemetry coverage, detection logic, false positives and false negatives, and validation
Ability to query and interpret evidence to support response decisions
Turn incident lessons into practical improvements to readiness, playbooks, detection coverage, and response tooling

Benefits

Medical Insurance
Dental Insurance
Vision Insurance
Health Savings Account Contributions
Flexible Spending Accounts
Dependent Care FSA
Commuter Benefits
401(k) With Employer Match
Paid Parental Leave
Paid Medical Leave
Paid Caregiver Leave
Paid Time Off
Paid Company Holidays
Paid Sick or Safe Time
Mental Health Support
Life Insurance
Disability Coverage
Learning and Development Stipend
Office Meals
Meal Delivery Credits
Relocation Support
Equity
Performance-Related Bonus
Charitable Donation Matching
Wellness Stipends

Company overview

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory and company based in San Francisco, California. Founded in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman, OpenAI initially operated as a non-profit research organization before transitioning to a capped-profit model. The company's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. OpenAI has developed groundbreaking AI technologies including GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) models, DALL-E for image generation, and Codex for programming assistance. Their most notable product, ChatGPT, has revolutionized human-AI interaction and brought large language models to mainstream audiences. OpenAI conducts cutting-edge research in machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and reinforcement learning, while also developing practical AI applications that are transforming industries worldwide.