Global Detection and Response Lead

About the Team

OpenAI’s Security organization exists to enable safe, responsible innovation at scale. As our systems, infrastructure, and research footprint grow, we invest deeply in world-class security capabilities that protect our people, products, and users without slowing progress.

This organization safeguards OpenAI’s environments by building advanced detection systems, driving real-time response capabilities, scaling telemetry and logging infrastructure, and delivering actionable threat intelligence to stay ahead of adversaries.

About the Role

We are seeking a Global Detection and Response Lead to own and scale OpenAI’s cybersecurity detection and response operations. In this role, you will set the strategy and drive execution for security monitoring, incident response, recovery, and post-incident improvements across our global infrastructure.

You will be a hands-on leader with deep technical credibility and strong operational instincts. You will build and mentor high-performing teams, partner closely with Infrastructure, Research, Product Security, Enterprise Security, IT, and Engineering, and ensure that detection and response capabilities are embedded by design into the systems that power OpenAI.

This is a strategic and practical leadership role requiring deep technical credibility, operational rigor, and the ability to build high-performing teams in a fast-moving environment.

In this role, you will:

• Oversee global detection and response operations, including continuous monitoring, triage, investigation, containment, and remediation of security events across a diverse set of networks and infrastructure.

• Lead, mentor, and directly manage several small teams of senior engineers across observability, detection and response, and threat intelligence. Hire and scale these functions deliberately and proportionately as OpenAI’s compute footprint and platform ambitions grow.

• Ensure world-class operational rigor and readiness through management of incident playbooks, on-call and escalation paths, tabletop exercises, and continuous improvement of response quality and speed.

• Improve detection quality and coverage by partnering with engineering teams to ensure critical telemetry is available, reliable, and actionable across cloud, corporate, and production environments.

• Deeply partner across all of OpenAI to evaluate and respond to emergent security concerns in a frontier AI lab environment, such as detection and response strategies for agents operating across infrastructure at scale.

• Build a world-class security program capable of withstanding tier-1 adversaries by maximally embracing our own models to solve frontier security problems.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 10+ years in cybersecurity with deep expertise in detection engineering, incident response, and security operations.

• Have an active U.S. Government security clearance (Top Secret) or willingness and eligibility to obtain one.

• Are mission-oriented, have unimpeachable integrity, and are passionate and motivated to detect and respond to adversaries in a highly complex, fast-paced environment.

• Have deep experience building and leading detection and response, instrumentation/observability, and threat intelligence teams across a global footprint, including airgapped and sovereign environments.

• Have stellar leadership skills, and a demonstrated history of driving durable, and continuous improvements to programs, processes, and people.

• Have exceptional written and verbal communication skills, can remain calm under pressure, and can effectively run command of security incidents involving numerous stakeholders across a diverse gamut of teams, expertise, and seniority.

• Have deep expertise in modern observability stacks (e.g., SIEM, data lakes, EDR, cloud telemetry, logging) and detection primitives.

• Understand modern adversary tradecraft (TTPs) and have demonstrated experience and exper