Engineering Manager, Distillation & Detection Platform

The role

You will lead a team of software engineers building detection and mitigation systems to prevent harmful misuse of frontier AI models. You will set technical roadmaps and build production services, pipelines, and tooling that scale with model usage.

What you will do

• Lead a team of software engineers building detection and mitigation systems for frontier model misuse.
• Set the technical roadmap and execution strategy.
• Build production systems including services, pipelines, tooling, instrumentation, and automation.
• Partner with Research and Product to translate model capabilities into tests, signals, and mitigations.
• Drive engineering fundamentals in architecture, reliability, monitoring, performance, and operational excellence.
• Hire and grow an exceptional team across backend, data systems, and applied ML engineering domains.
• Anticipate what breaks at scale as agentic workflows become more capable.

Required qualifications

• 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.
• Demonstrated ability to partner cross-functionally with Research, Product, and Security to ship systems that reduce risk or abuse at scale.
• Experience building systems in adversarial, fast-evolving environments.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and novelty.
• Experience adjacent to security such as abuse prevention, fraud, integrity, platform defense, auth/identity, malware/spam, or adversarial environments.
• Communicate clearly and build trust quickly with senior stakeholders.

Nice to have

• 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.

About the company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. They seek to safely deploy AI through their products.