Data Center Security Technical Lead

OpenAI • Full-time • Remote (United States) • $490k / year • 1d ago

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 are seeking a highly experienced and strategic cybersecurity leader to join our team to lead our data center security efforts. This person will drive the overall vision and execution of cyber defense and security architecture efforts for OpenAI’s rapidly expanding datacenter footprint, spanning multiple, diverse environments. You will be directly responsible for leading a multidisciplinary team to ensure the security of these ambitious infrastructure programs, including key projects already in flight.

This role is open to remote employees, or relocation assistance is available to one of our OpenAI offices in San Francisco, Seattle, or New York City.

In this role, you will:

Spearhead the overall security vision, architecture, execution, and sustained operations to protect data center infrastructure across a global footprint.
Recruit, mentor, and lead a diverse, distributed, and multidisciplinary team of security professionals across multiple timezones to securely enable mission impact.
Integrate hardware‑rooted trust, segmented enclaves, side‑channel mitigations, and insider‑risk countermeasures tuned for persistent, well‑resourced adversaries.
Drive security design reviews, threat modeling, supply‑chain risk assessments, secure provisioning, runtime monitoring, incident response, and structured decommissioning.
Deeply collaborate with engineering, operations, and security teams to define, implement, enforce, and evolve security best practices, including network segmentation, physical security, identity management, and access control policies.
Engage with suppliers and partners to evaluate and mitigate risks associated with third-party hardware, firmware, and software dependencies.
Prepare and deliver executive-level updates on risk posture, compliance, incident status, and program progress.
Ensure our facilities meet the strictest compliance requirements.
Continually evolve the security of our data centers alongside advances in cybersecurity controls, adversary activity, and commensurate with increased sophistication and risks of our frontier models.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

15+ years in security, including 10+ years leading large-scale infrastructure or datacenter programs with global scope.
Proven track record protecting hyperscale, colocation, or hybrid environments against sophisticated adversaries, including insider threats and close-access attacks.
Demonstrated success recruiting, developing, and retaining multidisciplinary security teams across time zones and cultures.
Deep knowledge of security design and operations, including host-level hardening, network segmentation, IAM/PAM, secure provisioning, firmware and bare-metal security, and governance frameworks.
Strong familiarity with control frameworks (e.g., NIST, ISO 27001, SOC 2) and experience driving compliance in regulated environments.

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.

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.

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