Engineering Manager, Distillation & Dectection Platform

About the role

Were looking for an engineering manager to lead a team building software systems that detect and prevent harmful misuse of frontier AI modelsbefore incidents occur. This is a builders role: youll lead engineers shipping production services detection pipelines and mitigation mechanisms that protect frontier model integrity and reduce high-severity misuse risk.

While this work intersects with frontier model development security and risk were explicitly seeking someone with a software engineering foundation who is comfortable building reliable systems that can operate at billions of users scale.

In this role you will:

• Lead a team of software engineers building detection mitigation systems for frontier model misuse with an emphasis on model IP protection / distillation detection and emerging risk surfaces from autonomous agents.

• Set the technical roadmap and execution strategy: prioritize design ship iterate measure impact.

• Build production systems: services pipelines tooling instrumentation and automation that scale with frontier model usage.

• Partner deeply with Research and Product to translate evolving model capabilities into concrete tests signals and mitigations that can be deployed at scale.

• Drive strong engineering fundamentals: architecture reliability monitoring performance and operational excellence.

• Hire and grow an exceptional team across backend data systems and applied ML engineering domains as needed.

• Anticipate what breaks at scale as agentic workflows become more capable.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Experience building systems in adversarial fast-evolving environments

• Are comfortable with ambiguity and novelty

• Have experience adjacent to security (e.g. abuse prevention fraud integrity platform defense auth/identity malware/spam adversarial environments)

• Communicate clearly and build trust quickly with senior stakeholderspragmatic collaborative and calm under scrutiny.

• Significant experience leading engineering teams and delivering production systems end-to-end.

• Strong technical judgment in system design distributed systems data pipelines observability and operational reliability.

• Demonstrated ability to partner cross-functionally with Research/Product/Security to ship systems that materially reduce risk or abuse at scale.

• Familiarity with model extraction / distillation adversarial evaluation or scalable detection/mitigation approaches.

• Background in autonomy high-scale real-time systems or intelligence-adjacent technical domains is a plus.

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 OpenAIs 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 addition job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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Required Experience:

Manager