Model Safety Program Manager, User Safety & Risk Operations

About the Team

At 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 Role

You’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.

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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