Engineering Manager, Distillation & Detection Platform
OpenAIAbout the role
We’re looking for an engineering manager to lead a team building software systems that detect and prevent harmful misuse of frontier AI models—before incidents occur. This is a builder’s role: you’ll lead engineers shipping production services, detection pipelines, and mitigation mechanisms that protect frontier model integrity and reduce high-severity misuse risk.
While this work intersects with frontier model development, security and risk, we’re explicitly seeking someone with a software engineering foundation who is comfortable building reliable systems that can operate at billions of users scale.
In this role you will:
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.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Experience building systems in adversarial, fast-evolving environments
Are comfortable with ambiguity and novelty
Have experience adjacent to security (e.g., abuse prevention, fraud, integrity, platform defense, auth/identity, malware/spam, adversarial environments)
Communicate clearly and build trust quickly 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 operat