Data Scientist, Preparedness

Details

The Preparedness team is part of the Safety Systems org at OpenAI and is guided by OpenAI’s Preparedness Framework. The team monitors and predicts the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems, identifies misuse risks with potentially catastrophic impacts, and ensures concrete procedures, infrastructure, and partnerships to mitigate those risks. Preparedness connects capability assessment, evaluations, internal red teaming, and mitigations for frontier models, and coordinates on AGI preparedness.

About the Role

We are hiring a Data Scientist to build, evaluate, and continuously improve mitigations that prevent extreme harms from AI systems. This individual contributor will take ambiguous problem statements, structure rigorous analyses, and translate findings into actionable product and policy changes. The role goes beyond running evaluations — you will help create mitigation intelligence and monitoring systems to detect issues early, measure effectiveness over time, and reduce both over-blocking and under-blocking.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate and improve mitigation systems, including classifiers and detection pipelines across domains (e.g., biosecurity, cybersecurity, and emerging risk areas).
• Diagnose false positives and false negatives through deep error analysis, root cause investigation, and provide clear recommendations for mitigation adjustments.
• Build monitoring and measurement frameworks to track mitigation effectiveness over time and across user segments and use cases.
• Identify trends in over-blocking vs. under-blocking, quantify customer impact, and propose prioritized interventions.
• Develop insights from customer feedback, complaints, and usage patterns to detect shifts in adversarial behavior and system failure modes.
• Expand risk monitoring into new areas, including cybersecurity threats and model loss-of-control or sabotage scenarios, in partnership with domain experts.
• Communicate results to technical and executive stakeholders with concise narratives, decision-ready metrics, and clear tradeoffs.

Who You Are / How You Might Thrive

• An autonomous operator who can independently structure end-to-end analyses from problem statement to action.
• Strong at executive-ready communication: concise, clear, and outcome-oriented.
• Skilled at turning analysis into productable changes and influencing across functions to drive mitigation improvements.

Qualifications

• Significant experience in data science or applied analytics in high-stakes domains (e.g., security, trust & safety, abuse prevention, fraud, platform integrity, or reliability).
• Strong foundations in experimentation, causal thinking, and/or observational inference; ability to design robust measurement under imperfect data.
• Fluency in SQL and Python (or equivalent) for analysis, modeling, and building monitoring workflows.
• Experience building metrics, dashboards, and operational monitoring that meaningfully changes outcomes.
• Track record of driving cross-functional impact with engineering, product, and research partners.

Preferred / Additional Experience

• Cybersecurity data science experience (strong preference), including exposure to threat modeling, adversarial dynamics, abuse patterns, or security telemetry.
• Experience with classifier evaluation, calibration, thresholding, and error analysis at scale; familiarity with detection systems in adversarial settings (e.g., evasion, distribution shift, feedback loops).
• Trust & Safety experience is helpful but not required.
• Genuine interest in AI safety, alignment, and catastrophic risk prevention.

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 AI capabilities and seek to safely deploy them through our products. OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

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.
• 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 company office closures throughout the year, 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.