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OpenAI

San Francisco

Manager, Cyber - Applied AI Architect

Posted yesterday

Level
Leadership
Experience
Not stated
Work style
On-site
Full-time
Pay
$217k to $241k

At a glance

The role in plain English

This role manages a team of Cyber Applied AI Architects who work directly with customers to design and implement AI-enabled security solutions using OpenAI technologies. The position involves hiring, coaching, and developing the team, balancing pre-sales and post-sales activities, and remaining hands-on with technical architecture and integration. It suits experienced technical leaders with a background in cybersecurity, customer engagement, and AI solution delivery.

What you'll do

  • Hire, coach, and develop a team of Cyber Applied AI Architects
  • Establish team priorities and allocate resources
  • Lead technical discovery with customer security teams
  • Guide solution design, architecture, and implementation plans
  • Oversee delivery from pre-sales to production deployment

What they're looking for

Essential

  • Experience managing customer-facing technical teams
  • Background in cybersecurity across multiple domains
  • Experience with pre-sales and post-sales technical engagement
  • Ability to design and troubleshoot AI-enabled solutions

Nice to have

  • Experience applying AI models or agentic patterns to workflows
  • Experience building teams in ambiguous environments

Core skills

  • AI solution design
  • Cybersecurity architecture
  • Cloud platforms
  • OpenAI APIs
  • Incident response
  • Vulnerability management
  • DevSecOps

The shape of the job

Technical depth

4/5

FoundationalSpecialist

Pace

4/5

SteadyFast-moving

Ownership

4/5

GuidedSelf-directed

Teamwork

5/5

Heads-downHighly collaborative

Cyberend's reading of the listing, not the employer's own scores.

How the pay compares

In line with similar roles

Compared with 30 open leadership roles in the US on Cyberend that state their pay.

This role

$217k to $241k a year

  • This role
  • Typical range ($178k to $258k)

Application toolkit

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Questions to prepare for

  1. 01Describe how you would lead a team through a complex AI-enabled security integration.
  2. 02How do you balance pre-sales and post-sales priorities for your team?
  3. 03Give an example of resolving a technical escalation involving AI and security tools.
  4. 04How would you approach designing a secure workflow using OpenAI APIs for a customer?

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company focused on developing and safely deploying general-purpose artificial intelligence.

Full job descriptionAs published by OpenAI

The Cyber Applied AI Architect Manager leads a team of customer-facing architects who partner with customers throughout the full lifecycle—from technical discovery and architecture design through implementation, deployment, and adoption. As a hands-on people leader, you’ll hire, coach, and develop the team while helping shape its technical approach and customer engagement model. You and your team will work closely with Sales and Solutions Engineering to understand customer security priorities and design AI-enabled solutions using OpenAI models, APIs, Codex, and agentic workflows.

After a customer commits, your team will remain engaged to translate the proposed solution into a production-ready implementation. You’ll provide architectural guidance, support complex technical decisions and escalations, and ensure consistent delivery across customer engagements. The work spans security workflows such as secure code review, vulnerability management, threat detection, incident response, SOC operations, and GRC automation.

In this role, you will:

  • Hire, coach, and develop a team of Cyber Applied AI Architects, setting clear expectations for technical excellence, customer impact, and career growth.
  • Establish team priorities, allocate resources, and balance pre-sales engagements with post-sales implementation and adoption.
  • Lead technical discovery with security executives, practitioners, architects, and engineering teams.
  • Partner with Sales and Solutions Engineering on AI solution design, demonstrations, workshops, technical validation, and proofs of concept.
  • Guide your team in translating customer requirements into clear solution architectures, implementation plans, success criteria, and technical milestones.
  • Oversee solutions from pre-sales architecture and prototyping through production deployment and adoption.
  • Serve as a senior technical partner for strategic customers, coordinating stakeholders and internal Product, Engineering, Security, and GTM teams.
  • Remain hands-on in designing, building, and troubleshooting complex integrations involving OpenAI models and APIs, Codex, agents, security tools, cloud platforms, and enterprise workflows.
  • Set standards for architectural reviews, evaluation frameworks, governance controls, guardrails, monitoring, and human-review processes.
  • Identify technical risks, resolve escalations, and turn customer feedback into actionable product and engineering priorities.
  • Measure team performance, customer adoption, and business impact, ensuring AI-enabled solutions deliver meaningful security outcomes.
  • Build reusable reference architectures, playbooks, demonstrations, and best practices that help the team scale.

You might thrive in this role if you:

  • Have experience hiring, managing, and developing customer-facing technical teams across solutions architecture, engineering, implementation, or professional services.
  • Bring experience spanning both pre-sales technical engagement and post-sales delivery, with ownership of customer outcomes.
  • Have hands-on cybersecurity expertise across areas such as AppSec, DevSecOps, cloud security, SOC, incident response, vulnerability management, identity, or security architecture.
  • Can coach architects, lead executive-level technical conversations, and remain comfortable designing, building, and troubleshooting solutions.
  • Have experience applying AI models, APIs, or agentic patterns to practical workflows and guiding pilots into production.
  • Can prioritize across customer engagements, manage technical escalations, and communicate architectural decisions and tradeoffs clearly.
  • Enjoy building teams and operating models in ambiguous environments while taking ownership of measurable customer adoption and impact.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement .

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form . No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link .

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

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