Engineering Manager, Distillation & Detection Platform
OpenAI · San Francisco
About 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