Strategy & Operations, User Safety & Risk Operations

The User Safety & Risk Operations team is at the core of ensuring OpenAI's products remain safe, trustworthy, and resilient as we scale globally. We protect users, the platform, and our ecosystem by detecting and responding to high-risk activity, operationalizing safety policies, and partnering across the company to mitigate emerging risks. Our work spans rapid incident response, complex risk reviews, fraud/scam mitigation, sensitive content handling, integrity workflows, and scaled safety operations that enable OpenAI to innovate responsibly.

We collaborate deeply with Product, Engineering, Policy, Legal, User Operations, and others to ensure our models and products can be used safely at global scale. OpenAI's user base ranges from everyday consumers to large enterprises, spanning a diverse set of use cases that evolve quickly - requiring our team to stay ahead of new behaviors, new risks, and new safety challenges.

We are seeking a strategic safety & risk operator to drive high-impact, cross-functional initiatives that strengthen OpenAI's ability to detect, prevent, and respond to risk across our products. In this role, you will work closely with leaders in Safety, Risk Ops, Product, Engineering, and the broader organization to mature, scale, and optimize the operational backbone that protects our platform.

Your work will focus on building the future of safety operations - leveraging LLMs, designing resilient workflows, shaping policy-to-ops translation, and ensuring our risk detection and response systems scale with product growth and user behavior. This role is not about maintaining static playbooks: AI fundamentally changes both risk vectors and the operational toolkit. You will anticipate the challenges ahead, define what world-class safety operations look like, and execute against that vision.

• Work across Safety, Risk Ops, Product, and Engineering to architect next-generation safety operational systems that meaningfully leverage LLMs and automation.

• Identify, evaluate, and prioritize strategic safety initiatives that strengthen our ability to detect and mitigate high-risk behavior across emerging and established vectors.

• Bring clarity and structure to ambiguous, rapidly evolving risk areas - creating frameworks, workflows, and operational excellence in environments characterized by chaos.

• Partner with product managers, engineers, and data teams to deeply understand risk surfaces, model limitations, escalation patterns, and safety workflows; then drive improvements in detection, triage, and response.

• Deep-dive into operational signals and risk performance metrics to uncover opportunities for automation, process optimization, and proactive risk mitigation.

• Translate safety & policy into scalable operational systems - ensuring we can effectively operationalize guidelines, thresholds, and enforcement strategies.

• Launch new safety initiatives and workflows in close partnership with cross-functional teams, driving both strategic planning and hands-on operational execution.

• Build mechanisms for continuous improvement, ensuring our operational posture and tooling evolve alongside new product capabilities, regulatory environments, and threat landscapes.

• Have 15+ years of experience in trust & safety, risk operations, policy enforcement, business operations, strategy, consulting, security, fraud/integrity, or similar domains - ideally in a high-growth or highly technical environment.

• Are energized by non-traditional problem spaces - this work requires defining new paradigms in a world where AI changes both the threats and the defenses.

• Operate seamlessly at multiple altitudes: you're able to zoom out and shape long-term safety strategy and zoom in to troubleshoot an operational gap during an active incident.

• Have a track record of taking end-to-end ownership of large, ambiguous operational challenges and breaking them into actionable, measurable, scalable systems.

• Are experienced influencing and partnering with senior leaders across engineering, product, legal, and operations in high-stakes, time-sensitive contexts.

• Are deeply analytical, with strong skills in operational modeling, risk trending, funnel analysis, and data-driven decision making.

• Communicate with clarity, authority, and empathy - especially when influencing across organizations or driving change management.

• Are passionate about safety, user protection, and responsible AI deployment - and excited about the transformative role AI can play in building safer digital ecosystems.

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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Compensation Range: $345K