Applied AI Engineer, Cyber, Government

The Applied AI Engineering team enables secure and impactful implementation of GenAI solutions, serving as technical thought partners and trusted advisors to clients. In this Government team role, you will empower agencies to evolve operations through automated content synthesis, advanced search, and bespoke applications leveraging OpenAI's foundational technologies.

We are looking for a hands-on Applied AI Engineer with deep cybersecurity experience and a product mindset to help government and national security customers apply frontier AI to critical cyber missions. You will bring practical expertise in red teaming, vulnerability research, reverse engineering, threat hunting, and similar fields, ideally developed through work with the defense and intelligence sector. Working directly with cyber operators, security researchers, and engineering teams, you'll identify high-value applications, write code, build and evaluate AI-powered tools and agentic workflows, and move solutions from prototype into secure operational use. You'll design architectures using OpenAI models, APIs, and existing security tooling, grounded in customers' mission requirements and operational constraints. This role is tied to our Washington, DC office, but will be based onsite in Maryland. We offer relocation support.

• Work on-site with clients in Maryland
• Own hands-on implementation for government cyber use cases
• Lead technical discovery for high-value AI applications across red teaming, adversary emulation, vulnerability research, reverse engineering, threat hunting, detection engineering, incident response, malware analysis, and similar domains
• Build secure cyber prototypes, agentic workflows, and reference architectures using OpenAI models, supported APIs, Codex, and integrations with customers' security tools
• Design and run evaluations measuring technical correctness, security impact, reliability, and operator effectiveness
• Partner with government security leaders, mission teams, account owners, integrators, and OpenAI Security and Product teams
• Contribute reusable code, examples, and technical guidance to open-source developer and enterprise resources
• Scale the Applied AI Engineering function by sharing knowledge and publishing notebooks and implementation patterns
• Translate customer deployments and insights into actionable feedback for Product, Engineering, and Research teams

• Hold an active TS/SCI clearance and a current, active full-scope polygraph
• Bring 7+ years of hands-on technical experience in cybersecurity, cyber operations, or security-focused software engineering, including work with government customers or national security mission teams
• Have practical experience across offensive and defensive cybersecurity, with depth in red teaming, adversary emulation, vulnerability research, reverse engineering, threat hunting, or detection engineering
• Experience supporting NSA or comparable national security cyber missions is strongly preferred
• Have personally written code, integrated security tools, and built, tested, and deployed cyber capabilities or security automation
• Understand secure network and cloud architecture, identity and least privilege, restricted operating environments, application-security toolchains, authorization boundaries, and human-approved remediation
• Have hands-on programming experience with Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, or Go, and can integrate APIs, agents, command-line tools, and security platforms into reliable workflows
• Relevant toolchains may include GitHub, CodeQL, Snyk, Semgrep, SARIF, Jira, and CI/CD systems
• Communicate clearly with cyber practitioners, engineers, senior leaders, and nontechnical stakeholders
• Own problems end to end and learn unfamiliar tools, systems, or mission requirements as needed
• Approach collaboration with humility and share knowledge generously
• Drive multiple concurrent projects with urgency, sound judgment, and clear prioritization

Salary range: $211K – $302K. Offers equity. Relocation support provided.