Product Engineer, Cyber
OpenAI is hiring a Product Engineer, Cyber for a remote role open to applicants in United States. It pays $255k-$445k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on OpenAI.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this cybersecurity role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
- The listed pay starts 60% above the typical cybersecurity posting on Level.
- The posting lists this role as remote.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include Go, Kubernetes and CI/CD.
- Level lists 792 other open roles at OpenAI.
AI in this role
Builds backend infrastructure and orchestration services enabling AI agents to securely investigate and fix security vulnerabilities.
About the Team
We are building the Defense Factory to help enterprises find and fix security vulnerabilities with AI. We build infrastructure that enables AI agents to work in secure, customer-controlled cloud environments, with the context, tools, and controls they need to investigate security findings, carry out approved actions, and verify results.
Our focus is turning AI capabilities into reliable security outcomes, starting with finding and fixing vulnerabilities and expanding into investigation, detection, and response. That means solving challenging problems in cloud environments, orchestration, security, and collaboration, while making the experience straightforward for the people directing and reviewing the work.
We’re a team that values initiative, close relationships with customers, and exceptional engineering craft. We take ownership, learn quickly, and communicate directly and kindly.
About the Role
We’re hiring backend-focused Product Engineers across our platform and security product teams. You’ll build infrastructure and customer-facing workflows that let developers and AI agents work reliably in parallel.
You’ll work primarily in Go on APIs, complex networking, development environments, and orchestration for long-running tasks. You’ll own outcomes from understanding a user’s problem and choosing an approach through shipping, operating, and improving the solution, working closely with frontend, infrastructure, and security engineers.
In this role, you will:
Work directly with customers to build developer and security workflows, from getting a project running to investigating findings, reviewing agent-generated changes, and verifying fixes.
Build Go services and APIs for provisioning cloud environments, running agents in customer infrastructure, and integrating with source control, CI, and other developer tools.
Design reliable orchestration for long-running, parallel work, including durable state, retries, cancellation, and recovery.
Build security into execution workflows through clear permissions, credential handling, isolation, and auditability.
Own production quality: testing, safe rollouts, observability, performance, and operational reliability.
Partner with frontend and design colleagues to make complex backend capabilities straightforward to use.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have strong Go skills and experience building and operating production backend systems.
Understand distributed systems, concurrency, and state, and can reason about failures and recovery.
Have practical experience with Linux, containers, cloud infrastructure, and networking, including routing, DNS, and secure connectivity.
Can design clear APIs and data models that simplify complex workflows.
Are product-minded and want to stay close to customers, understand their needs, and own solutions from problem discovery through launch and iteration.
Communicate technical decisions clearly and work effectively across disciplines and locations.
Experience building on AWS, GCP, or Azure is a plus. Depth in one or more of developer platforms, workflow engines, Kubernetes, networking, sandboxing, identity systems, security products, or AI-agent workflows would be useful; we don’t expect expertise across all of them. Frontend experience is welcome but not required.
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
Product Engineer, Cyber at OpenAI rates 85 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ 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
Also common in cybersecurity jobs at this level
Pay
- This job starts at
- $255k
- Typical cybersecurity job
- $159k
This posting starts 60% above the typical cybersecurity job. See cybersecurity jobs
Questions you could be asked
- How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
- Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
- Tell me about a project where backend was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where cloud infrastructure was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI agents, AI Research, Backend, Distributed Systems, and Cloud Infrastructure. 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.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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