Security Preparedness Lead, Coding Agents
Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This role sits at the intersection of SaaS security and frontier AI operations, where internal “coding agents” start to look like production systems in their own right. In that context, preparedness work becomes less about conventional perimeter defense and more about anticipating how capability gains change the threat surface, especially when automation can amplify both developer productivity and attacker leverage.
For a SaaS career, the differentiator here is exposure to security as an enabling function for product velocity and platform reliability, rather than a downstream compliance exercise. The remit spans threat modeling, prioritising security investments with real lead times, and translating research-grade risk into implementable controls. That blend of measurement, mitigation, and cross-functional coordination maps well to modern SaaS environments where security decisions increasingly shape roadmap, architecture, and operational maturity.
The position is best suited to practitioners who prefer hands-on technical ownership alongside program leadership, and who are comfortable working across Security, Infrastructure, and Research to align on tradeoffs. It will appeal to candidates motivated by adversarial thinking and ambiguity, particularly those interested in how SaaS teams can safely adopt autonomous systems without outsourcing critical judgement to tooling.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the team
Preparedness is a critical Safety Research team at OpenAI, which is focused on mitigating
AI threats to global security
that could scale to an extreme level of severity.
Our work involves:
Measurement. Monitoring and predicting the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems.
Mitigation. Keeping misuse safeguards, alignment tools, and security measures on track to adequately address extreme threats that might arise in the future.
Coordination. Setting mitigation targets by maintaining OpenAI’s
preparedness framework
, and partnering with other staff to achieve these targets.
This is urgent, fast-paced work that has far-reaching implications for the company and for society.
About the role
The stakes of securing OpenAI increases as our internal coding and research becomes increasingly driven by autonomous AI agents. Compromising these agents could allow a cyber threat actor to compromise many other parts of the company. In this role, you would lead Preparedness work defending the security of our internal AI agents against insiders, Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), or powerful AI agents. We’re looking for a strong hands-on technical executor with experience working directly with advanced cyber threat actors.
In this role, you will:
Develop and maintain threat models via which advanced attackers could compromise our coding assistants and automated security systems.
Identify security investments that are especially critical to make in advance; for example, prioritizing by implementation lead-times, costs, and benefit.
Partner with Security, Infrastructure, Research, Legal, and Preparedness to align on implementation plans and tradeoffs.
Lead technical execution directly when needed, including prototyping controls, writing and reviewing software, and coordinating engineers across teams.
Work with penetration testers to close gaps in defenses.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Are an exceptional hands-on technical executor.
Have worked with advanced persistent threat actors, or other capable cyberoffensive groups.
Can creatively reason about non-standard security problems and design workable controls under tight constraints.
Have led technical programs or teams.
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.
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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this
link
.
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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.