Data Scientist, Safety

Details

OpenAI’s Safety teams work to ensure its products are safe, trusted, and resilient as frontier AI systems scale globally. The teams address challenges involving misuse and misalignment, fraud and abuse, and the protection of vulnerable users. Data Scientists may contribute across Safety Systems, Integrity, and Product Policy.

This role operates at the intersection of product, safety, policy, and research, providing analytical foundations for the responsible deployment of increasingly capable AI systems.

Responsibilities

• Measure harmful or abusive behavior across OpenAI’s products.
• Detect fraud, manipulation, and coordinated misuse.
• Evaluate and improve safety classifiers, rules systems, mitigation systems, and human review workflows.
• Design experiments and causal analyses to understand product, policy, and mitigation impacts.
• Build prevalence estimators, dashboards, monitoring systems, and executive decision frameworks.
• Diagnose gaps in safety and integrity systems using behavioral and product data.
• Quantify and navigate false-positive and false-negative tradeoffs.
• Translate ambiguous safety risks into measurable problems and evidence-based recommendations.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Policy, Research, and Operations teams to improve safety outcomes.
• Build analytical systems from zero to one in rapidly evolving domains.

Requirements

• Strong statistical reasoning and analytical judgment.
• Experience with experimentation, causal inference, or observational analysis.
• Strong SQL and Python skills.
• Experience working with messy, incomplete, or noisy datasets.
• Ability to structure open-ended business or risk problems.
• Excellent communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• High ownership and comfort operating independently.

Helpful backgrounds include Trust & Safety or Integrity, fraud and abuse, security analytics, AI/ML model measurement and evaluation, alignment and AI safety research, and biosecurity, synthetic biology, infectious diseases, or computational biology.

Benefits

• Base compensation of $230,000–$325,000 USD, plus equity.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health, dependent care, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, company holidays, office closures, and paid sick or safe time.
• Mental health and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily meals in offices and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional benefits may include charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.

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