OpenAI FDE

Forward Deployed Security Engineer

  • Location Washington, DC
  • Compensation 266,000 – 445,000 USD / year
  • Type FullTime
  • Team Security
  • Seniority mid
  • Posted 2026-05-21

Original posting ↗ You apply on the company site — we never collect applications.

Extracted automatically from public job postings. Always verify details on the original posting before applying.

role details

Embeds with public sector customers to implement and maintain security controls, ensuring infrastructure deployments are secure against adversaries.

Summary generated by AI from the original posting.

Hard requirements to check first

  • Clearance:Active US security clearance
  • Work auth:not mentioned in the posting
  • Customer site:yes — deployed at customer
  • Travel:customer-facing; travel not stated

Skills

PythonGoKubernetesTerraformAWSAzureaccess controlsauthenticationencryptionnetwork securitysystem securitycloud platforms (Azure, AWS)

Excerpt from the original posting

About the Team 
Security is at the foundation of OpenAI’s mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Security team protects OpenAI’s technology, people, and products. We are technical in what we build but are operational in how we do our work, and are 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 
Our technologies support some of the most important and impactful work in the world, including our strategic and high-impact customers in the public sector. As a Forward Deployed Security Engineer (FDSecE) you will be responsible for securing these novel applications of OpenAI’s technology. We’re looking for motivated, tenacious, and curious people who will work closely with engineering teams to ensure our infrastructure deployments are highly secure against our adversaries.
As an FDSecE, you will embed directly throughout the lifecycle, working on-site and being hands-on to ensure the overall security of these deployments from design to production and through ongoing operations.
This role is preferred to be based in Washington DC but may consider remote work. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. Travel to and working from customer sites is required for this role.

In this role, you will: 
- Deeply embed with our most strategic public sector customers to implement and maintain robust security controls.

- Be a design and technical thought partner by leveraging security expertise on protective controls including access controls, authentication, encryption, network, and system security.

- Collaborate closely with teammates, cross-functional teams, customers, and service providers to achieve security and compliance goals.

- Ensure continuity of critical security and monitoring controls through routine security assessments, threat monitoring, and security validation exercises.

You might thrive in this role if you have: 
- An active US security clearance.

- 5+ years of security engineering experience, with an emphasis on infrastructure security, application security, network security, datacenter security, and systems engineering.

- Familiarity with deployment models, including to cloud platforms (Azure, AWS) and the underlying infrastructure primitives…

→ OpenAI · Ashby

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  • The title, level and compensation match the original posting.
  • The role is still open — postings often close without notice, we drop them within 10 days of disappearing.
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