Executive in Residence, Cyber

About the role

OpenAI is seeking an accomplished CISO/CSO or equivalent cybersecurity executive to help security leaders turn frontier AI into practical cyber defense. As an Executive in Residence, you will be a visible industry voice and a trusted peer to senior customer and partner leaders, working alongside our account, technical, product, research, and deployment teams.

We are looking for someone security leaders already want to hear from in person and digitally. You bring a recognized reputation, substantive operating experience, and a record of attracting senior audiences through the quality of your ideas and judgment. Your participation should make an industry agenda more compelling and bring the right leaders into the room.

You will combine invited speaking and executive engagement with the work needed to move customers from interest to adoption. You will also bring field insights into OpenAI’s cyber efforts and advance selected strategic initiatives agreed with cyber leadership.

About OpenAI Cyber

Cybersecurity is entering a period of fundamental disruption, and AI creates an opportunity to raise the bar for defense across the entire industry. At OpenAI, we are bringing together frontier research, security products, and partnerships to help defenders scale their expertise, protect more systems, and close the gap between identifying risk and taking action. Our ambition is to make stronger security achievable for organizations of every size and help the industry rethink what effective defense can look like. Joining now means helping shape that transformation while its foundations are still being built. For an experienced security leader, this is an opportunity to turn hard-earned judgment into capabilities that empower defenders worldwide—and influence the standards, practices, and technology that define the next era of cybersecurity.

In this role, you will:

• Represent OpenAI in consequential industry conversations. Deliver invited keynotes, contribute to substantive panels, and lead executive briefings on AI and cyber defense. Develop original talks and articles grounded in operating experience, evidence, and practical lessons.

• Convene senior security leaders. Use your reputation and relationships to attract relevant audiences and host candid CISO dinners, closed-door roundtables, and peer discussions. Build lasting relationships across your region or priority industries.

• Help customers make decisions and deploy. Work with account and technical teams to identify priority defensive workflows, build executive sponsorship, address organizational barriers, and shape pilots with clear objectives, owners, and next steps toward deployment.

• Bring the field into product and research. Capture customer needs, adoption barriers, and deployment lessons. Translate recurring themes into specific recommendations for product, research, and field teams, and help assess whether changes address the underlying problem.

• Advance strategic initiatives. Lead selected projects where your executive experience, industry relationships, or ability to coordinate across teams can accelerate progress. Establish the intended outcome and follow through with the relevant owners.

• Strengthen field effectiveness. Help teams prepare for senior security conversations, develop useful executive briefing materials, and turn engagements into sustained relationships and agreed actions.

• You will prioritize independently invited thought leadership, major industry forums, and curated executive engagements consistent with the program’s speaking principles. Each engagement should have a clear purpose, an appropriate audience, and an owner for follow-through.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• Experience as a CISO or equivalent security executive with direct accountability for a substantial security program, including difficult decisions about risk, investment, incidents, and organizational change.

• An established reputation among senior security leaders in a relevant region, sector, or the broader industry. You can demonstrate that your participation attracts executive audiences and earns invitations to respected forums.

• A strong speaking record and the ability to hold a room, handle unscripted questions, and lead candid peer discussions. Your communication is clear, technically credible, and useful to the audience.

• Technical depth to discuss security architecture and defensive operations with practitioners, and the judgment to explain the capabilities, limitations, and implications of AI to executives and boards.

• Trusted relationships with CISOs and other senior technology leaders, plus a record of building relationships beyond your existing network.

• Experience turning executive alignment into action across teams, with evidence of adoption, deployment, or measurable improvements in security outcomes.

• The ability to listen closely, exercise discretion, and represent customer needs accurately. You work effectively with commercial and technical colleagues and distinguish evidence from speculation.

Additional experience we value

• Deep experience in technology, retail, telecommunications, life sciences, or healthcare, or a strong regional security leadership network.

• Practical work applying AI to security, leading enterprise technology adoption, or advising organizations through significant changes in security operations.

• Published practitioner work, influential research, or sustained contributions to security communities that demonstrate the substance behind your public reputation.

This role involves regular travel for customer meetings and industry engagements.

How success will be measured

• Demand for your participation in respected industry forums, the relevance and seniority of audiences you attract, and the quality of the discussions you lead.

• Scale and scope of your online presence sharing OpenAI’s message.

• Stronger executive relationships that result in clear customer decisions, well-scoped pilots, and progress toward sustained deployment.

• Specific field insights that influence product, research, or deployment decisions, and delivery of agreed strategic initiatives.

• Practical content and briefings that customers and field teams use, with evidence that engagements lead to useful follow-through.

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.

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