Job description
About the Team
At OpenAI, our User Safety & Risk Operations team is responsible for safeguarding our platform and users from abuse, fraud, and emerging threats. We operate at the intersection of product risk, operational scale, and real-time safety response—supporting users ranging from individuals to global enterprises across ChatGPT, API, platform integrations, and more.
The Emerging Risk Operations team is our early-warning and early intervention function, responsible for identifying and investigating novel, fast-evolving, or ambiguous user safety and wellbeing risks. The team partners closely with Policy, Legal, Research, and other stakeholders to build scalable detection and data sharing systems, escalation paths, and user support workflows in response to sensitive and undefined harms.
About the Role
We are looking for a systems-oriented operations leader to build and scale the Emerging Risk Operations team into a high-leverage function that moves quickly, reasons through ambiguity, and learns continuously. You’ll be responsible for shaping how OpenAI detects and responds to novel, fast-evolving or high-context user safety risks that don’t yet have a clear policy, product coverage, or operational playbook.
In this role, you’ll lead a team of automation developers, analysts, and vendor partners focused on surfacing and triaging emerging risks. You’ll design and implement workflows for classifier feedback, anomaly detection and analysis, ticket pattern discovery, and exploratory investigations. You’ll also work closely with cross-functional partners - including Research, Model and Product Policy, Legal, and others - to ensure that operational signals are flowing into the right technical, product, and policy loops. Clear, strategic communication will be a critical part of this role, especially when engaging with executive stakeholders on sensitive or ambiguous situations.
Please note: These roles may involve handling sensitive content, including material that may be highly confidential, sexual, violent, or otherwise disturbing.
These roles are based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees
In this role, you will:
Build and lead a team responsible for handling safety risks across the platform.
Design and scale workflows for detection, analysis, data flywheels, and operational support
Drive technical feedback loops with modeling and classifier teams, and use qualitative + quantitative insights to improve detection systems.
Develop and deliver trend analysis and insights reporting for cross-functional stakeholders, surfacing risk patterns, escalation themes, and early signals
Stand up new workflows and playbooks for novel risks and harms.
Partner with Policy, Product, Legal, and Engineering teams to shape detection, enforcement, and automation strategies.
Partner with Vendor Operations to optimize coverage, training, and performance management for external teams.
Measure signal strength, triage outcomes, and feedback loops using dashboards, labeling pipelines, and team metrics
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have 8+ years in Trust & Safety, Risk Operations, Integrity, or adjacent fields, including 5+ years of people management experience.
Have built and scaled high-performing operational teams—including people, processes, vendors, and tooling.
Have strong familiarity with LLM behaviors, classifier development, or AI-driven workflows; direct experience with tools like Python, SQL, or OpenAI APIs is preferred.
Are comfortable triaging complex, ambiguous escalations and influencing detection, automation, or model improvement workstreams.
Are a clear and strategic communicator who can engage leadership and cross-functional stakeholders with precision, context, and influence.
Maintain a collaborative, humble approach and a strong bias for action.
Are energized by ambiguous problem spaces, approach risk with humility and structure, and can build repeatable systems in environments with limited precedent.
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.
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
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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.
