# Cyber Operations Lead, Critical Harm Operations

**Company:** [OpenAI](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/openai)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** Security Engineering
**Salary:** $252k – $335k/yr
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** Cybersecurity, Cyber Intelligence, Threat Intelligence, Incident Response, Security Research, Automation, Quality Assurance, Root-Cause Analysis, SOPs, Decision Trees, Calibration, Adjudication, Service-Level Agreements, Vendor Management, Abuse Prevention
**Posted:** 2026-08-31

> Leads cybersecurity and cyber intelligence operations for high-risk user-safety decisions, combining strategic planning, operational systems, automation, and direct people management. Requires 8+ years in cybersecurity-related work and 4+ years leading teams.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Set the strategic direction for Cyber Operations and translate organizational priorities into operating models, roadmaps, SOPs, escalation paths, quality goals, and safe-access strategies.
- Serve as the senior cybersecurity and cyber intelligence expert for complex, high-risk decisions across products and emerging product surfaces.
- Lead and develop a high-performing team while influencing FTEs, BPO partners, vendors, and cross-functional stakeholders.
- Convert policy ambiguity, quality misses, appeals, and reviewer disagreement into decision rules, calibration examples, training, and tooling requirements.
- Build reviewer capability through onboarding, certification, coaching, feedback, recurring calibration, and vendor partnership.
- Own queue coverage, productivity, quality metrics, SLA adherence, escalation hygiene, and performance-gap identification.
- Use analysis and automation to diagnose root causes, prioritize high-leverage fixes, reduce manual effort, and improve operational scale.
- Build quality and evaluation systems using calibration, adjudication, monitoring, and feedback loops.
- Create and scale new operational capabilities from 0→1 by defining problems, aligning partners, testing models, establishing metrics, and operationalizing successful approaches.
- Present recommendations, tradeoffs, and operational strategy to executives and partners, and represent Cyber Operations in high-stakes discussions and launches.

## Requirements
- 8+ years of experience in cybersecurity, cyber intelligence, threat intelligence, incident response, security research, or a related field.
- 4+ years of experience leading teams.
- Experience building and scaling cyber operations, cyber intelligence, or abuse-prevention capabilities across regions, products, or large user bases.
- Experience designing and launching human-in-the-loop automation or evaluation systems that improve safety, quality, or operational scale.
- Strong judgment regarding attacker behavior, emerging threats, abuse patterns, and ambiguous dual-use activity.
- Experience building or improving high-stakes operations, reviewer programs, QA systems, escalation workflows, or vendor/BPO programs.
- Strong analytical, root-cause analysis, program-building, stakeholder management, coaching, and executive communication skills.
- Ability to translate complex cyber and policy judgment into reviewer-usable SOPs, decision trees, training, and concise recommendations.
- Exceptional customer-service, de-escalation, discretion, and sensitive-material handling skills.

## Compensation
- Annual salary: $252,000–$335,000.

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