Software Engineer

Applied AI Engineer, Cyber, Government | OpenAI

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Applied AI Engineer, Cyber, Government

OpenAI for Gov - Washington, DC

About the team

The mission of the Applied AI Engineering team is to enable the secure and impactful implementation of GenAI solutions. We serve as technical thought partners and trusted advisors to our clients, ideating high-value use cases and providing the hands‑on guidance necessary to drive projects into production.

In this role within the Government team, you will empower agencies to evolve their operations through automated content synthesis, advanced search capabilities, and bespoke applications leveraging our latest foundational technologies and models.

About the Role

We are looking for a hands‑on Applied AI Engineer with deep cybersecurity experience and a product mindset to help government and national security customers apply frontier AI to critical cyber missions. You will bring practical expertise in areas such as red teaming, vulnerability research, reverse engineering, threat hunting, and similar fields , ideally developed through work with the defense and intelligence sector. Working directly with cyber operators, security researchers, and engineering teams, you’ll identify high‑value applications, write code, build and evaluate AI‑powered tools and agentic workflows, and move solutions from prototype into secure operational use. You’ll design architectures using OpenAI models, APIs, and existing security tooling, grounded in customers’ mission requirements and operational constraints. You will collaborate closely with Sales, Solutions Engineering, Applied Research, Product, and Security teams to deliver measurable improvements in cyber capabilities and translate customer experience into better models and products.

This role requires frequent on‑site engagement at customer and partner facilities across the DMV area, including classified environments.

In this role, you will:

• Work on‑site with our clients in the DMV area

• Own hands‑on implementation for government cyber use cases, working alongside account‑aligned technical owners, customer engineers, cyber operators, and security practitioners.

• Lead technical discovery to identify high‑value AI applications across authorized red teaming, adversary emulation, vulnerability research, reverse engineering, threat hunting, detection engineering, incident response, malware analysis, and similar domains.

• Build secure cyber prototypes, agentic workflows, and reference architectures using OpenAI models, supported APIs, Codex, and integrations with customers’ security tools and infrastructure.

• Design and run evaluations that measure technical correctness, security impact, reliability, and operator effectiveness, and use the results to guide implementation and deployment decisions.

• Partner with government security leaders, mission teams, account owners, integrators, and OpenAI Security and Product teams to establish success criteria, deliver measurable outcomes, and complete clear operational handoffs.

• Contribute reusable code, examples, and technical guidance to our open‑source developer and enterprise resources.

• Scale the Applied AI Engineering function by sharing knowledge, codifying best practices, and publishing notebooks and implementation patterns to internal and external repositories.

• Translate customer deployments, operational insights, and evaluation results into actionable feedback for Product, Engineering, and Research teams.

You’ll thrive in this role if you:

• Hold an active TS/SCI clearance and a current, active full‑scope polygraph.

• Bring 7+ years of hands‑on technical experience in cybersecurity, cyber operations, or security‑focused software engineering, including work directly with government customers or national security mission teams.

• Have practical experience across offensive and defensive cybersecurity, with depth in areas such as red teaming, adversary emulation, vulnerability research, reverse engineering, threat hunting, or detection engineering. Experience supporting NSA or comparable national security cyber missions is strongly preferred.

• Have personally written code, integrated security tools, and built, tested, and deployed cyber capabilities or security automation with measurable technical and mission outcomes.

• Understand secure network and cloud architecture, identity and least privilege, restricted operating environments, application‑security toolchains, authorization boundaries, and human‑approved remediation.

• Have hands‑on programming experience with languages such as Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, or Go, and can integrate APIs, agents, command‑line tools, and security platforms into reliable workflows. Relevant toolchains may include GitHub, CodeQL, Snyk, Semgrep, SARIF, Jira, and CI/CD systems.

• Communicate clearly with cyber practitioners, engineers, senior leaders, and nontechnical stakeholders, translating complex technical findings into decisions and next steps.

• Own problems end to end and learn unfamiliar tools, systems, or mission requirements as needed to deliver.

• Approach collaboration with humility, share knowledge generously, and help colleagues and customers succeed.

• Drive multiple concurrent projects with urgency, sound judgment, and clear prioritization while maintaining a high standard of technical execution.

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 Afficative 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.

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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.

Compensation

$211K – $302K + Offers Equity