Job Title: Lead, Data Center Security

Salary: $490K Employment Type: Full-Time Location Type: Remote (Relocation assistance available to San Francisco, Seattle, or New York City)

About the Team

Security is fundamental to OpenAI’s mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Security team is responsible for protecting OpenAI’s technology, people, and products. We are technical in our approach to building solutions and operational in our execution, 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

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

Responsibilities

• 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 time zones 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.

Qualifications

• 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.