Head of Operations, Corporate Security

About the Team

The Corporate Security team is responsible for the security and protection of all OpenAI employees and executives. We are committed to creating and maintaining a secure environment that allows our team members to focus on their work without fear of harm or disruption.

About the Role

As Director of Operations, Corporate Security — San Francisco, you will lead physical security operations at OpenAI’s headquarters and across the Bay Area footprint. This is the senior operational security leader for SF and a critical partner to Corporate Security leadership.

You will own day-to-day security execution at HQ, including guard force oversight, Global Security Operations Center performance, access control standards, and incident response. You will design systems that scale, build strong cross-functional partnerships, and ensure OpenAI employees can work in a secure, welcoming environment.

This role reports directly to the VP of Corporate Security and requires strong judgment, executive presence, and the ability to operate effectively in ambiguity while maintaining a high bar for operational excellence.

In this role, you will:

• Own day to day physical security operations for OpenAI San Francisco and the Bay Area footprint, including guard force oversight, access control, and site hardening.

• Lead the SF Global Security Operations Center and incident response playbooks to ensure rapid, measured action during incidents.

• Manage vendor relationships, contracts, and budgets for uniformed services and security technology, and hold vendors to measurable SLAs.

• Build and maintain access control and visitor management policies that protect people while supporting a welcoming workplace.

• Coordinate protective intelligence and law enforcement engagement for SF leadership and critical events.

• Design and run emergency preparedness, crisis response, and continuity planning for SF sites.

• Mentor and develop security operations staff and lines of work to create reliable, repeatable systems.

• Serve as the primary SF security partner to Workplace, Real Estate, Executive Protection, Legal, and People teams.

• Represent SF CorpSec to senior leadership and the broader company, advising on risk and operational trade offs with clarity and empathy.

You may be a fit for this role if you have:

• 15+ years of progressive security leadership experience across corporate, public sector, military, or similarly complex environments, including oversight of large, multi-site operations. Law enforcement experience is a plus.

• Proven experience leading physical security programs at a large HQ or multi office campus, including guard force and access control.

• Track record of building scalable systems and playbooks from ambiguous starting points.

• Experience leveraging technology to drive automation and scale, with experience designing and implementing enterprise access control, CCTV, visitor management, and AI-enabled security platforms, while utilizing internal tools and data systems to improve operational efficiency and visibility.

• Strong vendor and contract management skills with experience driving measurable service delivery.

• Experience working with executive stakeholders and external partners, including law enforcement and local authorities.

• Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to translate operational trade offs for senior leaders.

• Comfort operating in ambiguity and making decisions under time pressure while prioritizing employee care and legal compliance.

• Familiarity with Google Workspace, emergency notification systems, and travel or risk intelligence platforms is helpful.

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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