Level

OpenAI

Manager, Cyber - Applied AI Architect

OpenAI is hiring a Manager, Cyber - Applied AI Architect in San Francisco, United States. It pays $217k-$241k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on OpenAI.

Level's read on this job

  • On Level's scale, this cybersecurity role is Works on AI ●●●○: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
  • Pay on this posting starts 36% higher than the typical cybersecurity posting on Level.
  • The posting mentions AI agents and AI research among its tools and skills.
  • OpenAI has 808 other open roles on Level.
  • Posted in the last few days.

AI in this role

ai-agentsai-research

The Cyber Applied AI Architect Manager leads a team of customer-facing architects who partner with customers throughout the full lifecycle—from technical discovery and architecture design through implementation, deployment, and adoption. As a hands-on people leader, you’ll hire, coach, and develop the team while helping shape its technical approach and customer engagement model. You and your team will work closely with Sales and Solutions Engineering to understand customer security priorities and design AI-enabled solutions using OpenAI models, APIs, Codex, and agentic workflows.

After a customer commits, your team will remain engaged to translate the proposed solution into a production-ready implementation. You’ll provide architectural guidance, support complex technical decisions and escalations, and ensure consistent delivery across customer engagements. The work spans security workflows such as secure code review, vulnerability management, threat detection, incident response, SOC operations, and GRC automation.

In this role, you will:

  • Hire, coach, and develop a team of Cyber Applied AI Architects, setting clear expectations for technical excellence, customer impact, and career growth.

  • Establish team priorities, allocate resources, and balance pre-sales engagements with post-sales implementation and adoption.

  • Lead technical discovery with security executives, practitioners, architects, and engineering teams.

  • Partner with Sales and Solutions Engineering on AI solution design, demonstrations, workshops, technical validation, and proofs of concept.

  • Guide your team in translating customer requirements into clear solution architectures, implementation plans, success criteria, and technical milestones.

  • Oversee solutions from pre-sales architecture and prototyping through production deployment and adoption.

  • Serve as a senior technical partner for strategic customers, coordinating stakeholders and internal Product, Engineering, Security, and GTM teams.

  • Remain hands-on in designing, building, and troubleshooting complex integrations involving OpenAI models and APIs, Codex, agents, security tools, cloud platforms, and enterprise workflows.

  • Set standards for architectural reviews, evaluation frameworks, governance controls, guardrails, monitoring, and human-review processes.

  • Identify technical risks, resolve escalations, and turn customer feedback into actionable product and engineering priorities.

  • Measure team performance, customer adoption, and business impact, ensuring AI-enabled solutions deliver meaningful security outcomes.

  • Build reusable reference architectures, playbooks, demonstrations, and best practices that help the team scale.

You might thrive in this role if you:

  • Have experience hiring, managing, and developing customer-facing technical teams across solutions architecture, engineering, implementation, or professional services.

  • Bring experience spanning both pre-sales technical engagement and post-sales delivery, with ownership of customer outcomes.

  • Have hands-on cybersecurity expertise across areas such as AppSec, DevSecOps, cloud security, SOC, incident response, vulnerability management, identity, or security architecture.

  • Can coach architects, lead executive-level technical conversations, and remain comfortable designing, building, and troubleshooting solutions.

  • Have experience applying AI models, APIs, or agentic patterns to practical workflows and guiding pilots into production.

  • Can prioritize across customer engagements, manage technical escalations, and communicate architectural decisions and tradeoffs clearly.

  • Enjoy building teams and operating models in ambiguous environments while taking ownership of measurable customer adoption and impact.

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.

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 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.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

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.

How we rate this

Manager, Cyber - Applied AI Architect at OpenAI rates 70 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI agentsAI Research

Also common in cybersecurity jobs at this level

Pay

This job starts at
$217k
Typical cybersecurity job
$159k

This posting starts 36% above the typical cybersecurity job. See cybersecurity jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
  2. Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
  3. Describe a typical day in a role like this one: which parts run through AI directly?
  4. If you removed AI from this role, what would be left, and how do you decide what still needs a human?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: AI agents and AI Research. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.

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