About the TeamAt OpenAI, our User Safety & Risk Operations (USRO) team helps protect our products and users from abuse, fraud, safety risks, and other forms of misuse. We translate real-world user and operational signals into timely decisions, practical interventions, and improvements to our products and systems.
This role works across USRO and partners with Safety, Research, Product, and Engineering to build sustainable operational programs for emerging model safety risks.
About the RoleYou'll build and run operational programs for emerging model safety risks. You'll work with Safety, Research, Product, Engineering, and Operations to define what a program needs to detect, when it should escalate, and how to tell if it's working. This is a senior individual contributor role based in San Francisco.
You will create clarity around scope, decision rights, dependencies, and success measures, then lead pilots through evidence-based rollout decisions and ongoing ownership.
Location / work model: San Francisco, CA; work model to confirm.
Please note: This role may involve exposure to sensitive or concerning content. Strong discretion, good judgment, and resilience are essential.
In This Role, You Will- Turn ambiguous safety priorities into programs with clear owners, milestones, operating procedures, and measurable outcomes.
- Lead pilots for proactive detection and response, set launch and escalation criteria, and use evidence to decide what to expand or change.
- Bring cross-functional partners together to resolve ownership and dependencies and keep decisions moving.
- Build reporting and feedback loops that turn operational findings into actionable input for Safety, Research, and Product partners.
- Establish documentation, training, quality checks, and a sustainable plan for ongoing ownership.
You Might Thrive in This Role If You- Experience leading complex cross-functional programs from an unclear starting point through launch and ongoing operation.
- Sound judgment in high-stakes or sensitive work, including how to communicate uncertainty and escalate urgent issues.
- Experience defining success measures and using data to make decisions, with enough technical fluency to partner on detection, evaluation, or tooling.
- Clear writing and a track record of securing decisions and follow-through across teams you don't manage.
Nice to Have- Experience in trust and safety, incident response, or another high-stakes risk domain.
- Experience transferring prototypes or new workflows into reliable, scaled operations.
