OpenAI

Technical Program Manager, AI Safety & Safeguards

OpenAI$150K — $180K *
Consumer Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of experience in technical program management or related field.
  • Strong technical fluency in platforms, systems architecture, and deployments.
  • Proven track record of delivering complex technical programs successfully.
  • Ability to navigate ambiguity and drive cross-functional collaboration.
  • Experience with safeguards, safety systems, or risk management in technology.

Responsibilities

  • Lead and shape technical roadmaps and priorities across multiple teams.
  • Transform safety and product objectives into actionable plans for execution.
  • Manage end-to-end programs from technical design to launch and operational follow-through.
  • Ensure accountability and risk management across various teams and functions.
  • Drive the development of safety measures and monitoring systems for deployments.
  • Coordinate readiness for high-stakes models and platforms.
  • Communicate program health and risks clearly to stakeholders, including executives.

Benefits

  • Opportunity to influence high-impact technical initiatives in cutting-edge AI.
  • Collaborative environment with cross-functional teams including engineering and research.
  • Focus on responsible deployment and user safety in AI technologies.
  • Engagement in critical safety and risk mitigation programs.
  • Access to professional growth opportunities within a leading tech company.
Full Job Description
About the Role

We're seeking Technical Program Managers to drive complex product, platform, and safety initiatives across ChatGPT, API, enterprise, and related deployment environments. These roles operate at the intersection of technical strategy and execution: you will turn safety and product priorities into actionable plans, influence architectural and operational decisions, and deliver durable capabilities across model, infrastructure, application, and platform layers.

Depending on the role, you may enable sensitive or high-impact model deployments, integrate safeguards into cloud and API platforms, prevent violent misuse and other serious harms, improve detection and enforcement systems, create platform solutions for safety or establish new programs as risks evolve. You will partner deeply with engineers, researchers, product managers, and operational teams while communicating technical tradeoffs and program decisions to senior leadership.

You bring technical fluency, product judgment, and a strong execution record. You're comfortable navigating ambiguity, advocating for users and developers, balancing safety with model usefulness, and leading cross-functional work with urgency, rigor, and empathy. Specific focus areas and scope will vary by opening and level.

In this role, you will:
  • Partner with product, engineering, research, and design to shape technical roadmaps, long-term platform direction, and safeguards priorities across ChatGPT, API, enterprise, and cloud environments.
  • Translate product and safety objectives into execution plans that balance near-term delivery, long-term platform evolution, customer needs, and responsible deployment.
  • Lead cross-functional programs end to end-from problem definition and technical design through implementation, launch, iteration, and operational follow-through.
  • Own milestones, dependencies, risk mitigation, decision-making, and accountability across engineering, infrastructure, integrity, trust and safety, legal, policy, operations, and go-to-market teams.
  • Partner with engineers on system architecture, public and internal APIs, cloud deployment patterns, platform integrations, operational failure modes, and technical tradeoffs.
  • Drive the development, integration, or rollout of safeguards such as model evaluations, post-training mitigations, classifiers, abuse detection, monitoring, enforcement workflows, human review, and agent-assisted review.
  • Coordinate readiness for sensitive or high-impact deployments, ensuring appropriate safety coverage, escalation paths, operational controls, and alignment with external cloud or enterprise partners.
  • Identify emerging misuse and severe-harm risks; define ownership and response mechanisms across prevention, detection, investigation, enforcement, and continuous improvement.
  • Establish meaningful metrics for program delivery, deployment readiness, safety effectiveness, operational quality, and user or developer experience.
  • Represent customer and developer needs in technical and leadership decisions, balancing risk reduction, model usefulness, implementation complexity, speed, and scale.
  • Communicate program health, risks, recommendations, and consequential tradeoffs clearly to engineering teams, cross-functional partners, and executives.
  • Improve delivery and safety outcomes through practical operating mechanisms, scalable tooling, and data- or AI-assisted workflows.
You might thrive in this role if you:
  • Have a strong track record of delivering high-impact technical programs across product, platform, API, infrastructure, machine learning, or safety domains.
  • Bring strong technical judgment across distributed systems, cloud deployments, public or internal APIs, developer platforms, production machine learning, or scalable product architecture.
  • Can engage credibly with engineers on system design, implementation tradeoffs, reliability, deployment constraints, and operational risks.
  • Have delivered platforms or developer-facing capabilities and understand how technical decisions affect customer experience, developer experience, and product usefulness.
  • Understand how safety, integrity, or abuse-prevention systems work, including evaluations, model guardrails, classifiers, monitoring, enforcement, investigations, and incident response.
  • Bring strong program management discipline and can coordinate multiple workstreams, resolve complex dependencies, and turn ambiguity into accountable execution.
  • Demonstrate product judgment and can balance user and customer needs with model usefulness, safety risk, technical complexity, and business priorities.
  • Communicate clearly and empathetically with engineering teams, executives, policy and legal partners, and external stakeholders.
  • Are comfortable owning high-stakes programs that require executive presence, cross-organizational influence, and sound decisions under uncertainty.
  • Have relevant experience with sensitive deployments, major cloud providers, or serious-harm domains such as violent misuse, child safety, cybersecurity, or other emerging threats.
  • Are hands-on, curious, and motivated to help ensure increasingly capable AI systems are deployed responsibly.


About OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. The company was founded in 2015 by a group of technology leaders, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and John Schulman. OpenAI's mission is to develop and promote friendly AI for the betterment of humanity. The company has developed a number of cutting-edge AI technologies, including GPT-3, a language processing system that can generate human-like text. OpenAI has received funding from a number of high-profile investors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Learn more about OpenAI
Size
100 employees
Industry
Founded
2015

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