Abuse Investigator - Child Safety

Details

About the Team

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Intelligence & Investigations team identifies, analyzes, and investigates misuse of OpenAI products, particularly novel or emerging abuse patterns, enabling partner teams to develop data-backed product policies and scalable safety mitigations.

About the Role

As a Child Safety Investigator on the Intelligence & Investigations team, you will identify and disrupt actors attempting to use OpenAI’s products to sexually exploit minors both online and in the real world. OpenAI maintains strict prohibitions in this area and reports apparent CSAM and other credible child sexual exploitation threats to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), consistent with applicable law and our policies.

This role requires domain-specific expertise, technical fluency, and the ability to operate in ambiguous, high-impact situations. You will conduct in-depth investigations into user behavior, analyze product data, identify emerging threat patterns, and support enforcement actions — including escalations requiring legal review and external reporting. Investigations may involve exposure to sensitive and disturbing material, including sexual or violent content.

You will also help develop detection strategies that proactively surface high-risk behavior, especially cases that evade existing safeguards, and respond to time-sensitive escalations.

Responsibilities

• Investigate high-severity child safety violations and disrupt malicious actors in partnership with Policy, Legal, Integrity, Global Affairs, Security, and Engineering teams, including through cross-platform and cross-internet research.
• Support investigations across other high-risk harm areas where child safety concerns intersect.
• Conduct open-source and cross-platform research to contextualize actors and abuse networks.
• Develop detection signals, behavioral heuristics, and tracking strategies to proactively identify high-risk users using tools such as SQL, Databricks, and Python.
• Communicate investigation findings clearly and effectively to internal stakeholders through written briefs, data-backed recommendations, and escalation summaries.
• Develop a deep, working understanding of OpenAI’s products, internal data systems, and enforcement mechanisms.
• Collaborate with engineering and data partners to improve investigative tooling, data quality, and analyst workflows.
• Support time-sensitive escalations and high-priority investigations requiring rapid analysis and sound judgment.
• Represent investigative findings externally with the press, governments, NGOs, and law enforcement agencies.
• Participate in a rotating on-call schedule to support timely response to high-priority safety incidents and sensitive investigations.

Requirements / Preferred Qualifications

• Deep expertise in online child safety and child exploitation threats; experience tracking threat actors in abuse domains (posting indicates at least 5+ years in relevant work).
• Familiarity or proficiency with technical investigations using SQL, Python, notebooks and scripts (Databricks and similar analytics environments are called out).
• Experience conducting open-source and cross-platform research (OSINT) to contextualize actors and networks.
• Experience developing detection signals, behavioral heuristics, and scaling/automating processes (including experience applying language models to automation is noted as desirable).
• Experience responding to time-sensitive escalations and presenting analytic findings to senior stakeholders or external partners.
• Willingness to work in situations that may involve exposure to disturbing material and to participate in on-call rotations.
• Ability to collaborate cross-functionally with legal, policy, engineering, integrity, and external partners.
• Speaking one or more languages in addition to English is listed as a plus.

Compensation & Benefits

• Listed base salary range: $158.4K – $425K (offers equity in addition to base pay).
• Benefits include medical, dental, and vision insurance (with employer HSA contributions), pre-tax FSA accounts, 401(k) with employer match, paid parental and caregiver leave, flexible PTO, paid company holidays, mental health and wellness support, employer-paid basic life and disability coverage, annual learning & development stipend, daily meals/meal credits, and additional fringe benefits.
• Relocation support is provided for eligible employees.
• Background checks are administered consistent with applicable law; OpenAI provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.