Biosafety Red Teaming Specialist

Details

About the Team

The Intelligence and Investigations team seeks to rapidly identify and mitigate abuse and strategic risks to ensure a safe online ecosystem in close collaboration with our internal and external partners. Our efforts contribute to OpenAI's overarching goal of developing AI that benefits humanity.

About the Role

We are looking for an expert in biological and chemical risks to lead red teaming efforts for biosafety and to help mature OpenAI’s bio bounty programs. You will help shape biology-relevant test plans, guide external and internal engagements, ensure our testing is impactful, and translate findings into clear outcomes. In addition, you’ll play a critical role in driving our bio bounty programs, including managing external researcher relationships, evolving challenge questions, reviewing submissions that require biological subject-matter expertise, and maturing the program as it continues to scale.

This role also requires broad and deep CBRN expertise, strong operational judgment or program management experience, and an adversarial mindset. You should be well-versed in understanding how a determined actor might misuse frontier AI systems, while also knowing how to turn sensitive findings into constructive, actionable safety work.

Responsibilities

• Lead bio red teaming work from a domain perspective, including shaping evaluation questions, scenarios, and success criteria for biology-relevant misuse pathways.
• Review and pressure-test bio red teaming outputs, assess report quality, and help translate findings into concise risk calls and recommended next steps.
• Identify new red teaming engagements or external expert collaborations that would improve OpenAI's visibility into biological and overall CBRN misuse risks.
• Bring an adversarial mindset to assess how malicious actors could attempt to misuse model capabilities across planning, protocol design, procurement, troubleshooting, and operationalization.
• Directly manage Bio Bounty program strategy and maturity, including challenge-question lifecycle, expert researcher pipeline, submission review standards, and program health.
• Partner with operations owners on program execution while providing subject-matter review where biological expertise is required.
• Review Bio Bounty applications and invite known experts when appropriate to strengthen the researcher pool.
• Lead final biological-risk review on eligible submissions before awards, including severity, impact, novelty, and mitigation.
• Lead cross-functional efforts with Preparedness, Safety Systems, Policy, Legal, and other teams to turn high-quality findings into concrete follow-up work.
• Communicate findings clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders, including concise briefings for leadership when needed.

Requirements

• Technical/scientific background with at least 8 years of technical CBRN experience.
• Deep subject-matter expertise in biosafety, biosecurity, biodefense, synthetic biology, microbiology, public health security, or adjacent CBRN domains, ideally with experience assessing dual-use biological risks.
• Experience with bio red teaming, threat modeling, misuse analysis, adversarial testing, intelligence analysis, or professional casework involving malicious actors or weaponization pathways.
• Strong operations and/or program management experience.
• Ability to prioritize ambiguous findings based on severity, feasibility, novelty, exposure, and potential real-world impact.
• Excellent judgment when handling sensitive biological information and ability to separate legitimate research from content that may enable harm.
• Ability to communicate complex technical and risk judgments in clear, grounded language for product, policy, safety, legal, and leadership audiences.
• Comfortable working cross-functionally in fast-changing environments where the right answer may require both technical depth and pragmatic execution.
• Enough technical fluency to partner with data, engineering, and safety teams on signals, tooling, and scalable review processes.
• Resilience and thoughtfulness when engaging with sensitive, high-stakes material.

Nice to have

• Prior experience managing a bounty, vulnerability disclosure, external researcher, or expert review program.
• Experience with AI safety evaluations, model red teaming, or frontier model risk assessment.
• Familiarity with how advanced AI systems may affect biological safety, biosecurity, or CBRN risk.

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.

OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit).
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks).
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees.
• 13+ paid company holidays and multiple coordinated company office closures, plus paid sick or safe time as required by law.
• Mental health and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily meals in offices and meal delivery credits as eligible.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional taxable fringe benefits such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.