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Engineering Manager, Distillation & Detection Platform

OpenAI· Applied AI
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San Francisco$400k - $445kFull-timePosted 7mo ago

About the role

Engineering manager to lead a team building software systems that detect and prevent harmful misuse of frontier AI models at scale, focusing on distillation detection and mitigation mechanisms to protect frontier model integrity and reduce high-severity misuse risk.

Responsibilities

  • 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.

Qualifications

  • Experience building systems in adversarial, fast-evolving environments
  • Comfort with ambiguity and novelty
  • Experience adjacent to security (e.g., abuse prevention, fraud, integrity, platform defense, auth/identity, malware/spam, adversarial environments)
  • Clear communication with senior stakeholders—pragmatic, 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
  • 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

Skills

Required:Leadership of engineering teamsDistributed systems designCross-functional collaboration
Nice to have:Security-aligned development

Benefits

  • Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
  • Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
  • 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
  • Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
  • Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
  • 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time
  • Mental health and wellness support
  • Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
  • Annual learning and development stipend
  • Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
  • Relocation support for eligible employees
  • Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends
Last updated Sep 3, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About OpenAI

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