Trust & Safety Operations Lead

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.

We are hiring for two new leadership roles within the team:

• Safety Response Operations - our global delivery and escalation team, responsible for vendor/internal escalations, quality reviews, model labeling, and operational support, with a path toward a global follow-the-sun 24/7 incident response function.

• Emerging Risk Operations - our early detection and response team for novel or fast-evolving risks, harmful model behavior, and edge-case integrity issues.

These roles are a key part of our broader Support organization and partner closely with Product, Engineering, Policy, Legal, Go To Market, and external vendors to keep our users and platform safe.

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced operations leader to build and scale safety workflows, teams, and programs in a fast-paced, high-stakes environment. This role requires comfort with both hands-on execution and cross-functional strategy, and will play a foundational part in shaping the long-term structure of our user safety and response efforts.

You'll build systems to address the most urgent risks on the platform-ranging from day-to-day vendor escalations to rapid response for new types of abuse or threats. You'll also be a key voice in evolving our incident response maturity and helping define how we scale global coverage.

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.

• Oversee daily operational workflows-including safety escalations, model labeling, abuse investigations, vendor delivery, and quality review programs.

• Serve as a point of escalation and coordination for high-priority incidents, driving response and resolution across cross-functional teams.

• Stand up new workflows and playbooks for incident response, escalation handling, and early risk detection.

• 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.

• Define and track operational metrics, SLAs, and KPIs to ensure operational excellence and identify process improvements.

• Drive initiatives to increase automation, efficiency, and data-driven insights in safety operations.
  

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 8 years in Trust & Safety, Risk Operations, or Incident Response, including 3 years of people management experience.

• Have built and scaled high-performing operational teams-including people, processes, vendors, and tooling.

• Are comfortable navigating ambiguity and complexity, especially in high-urgency or high-sensitivity scenarios.

• Have a track record of process improvement and using data to drive operational decisions.

• Thrive in ambiguous, high-stakes environments and can balance immediate response with long-term operational maturity.

• Maintain a collaborative, humble approach and a strong bias for action.

• Bring strong cross-functional collaboration skills and a structured, data-driven approach to operations.

• Have worked with or around LLMs, classifiers, or novel abuse surfaces in fast-moving product environments.

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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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.

Compensation Range: $235K - $280K