Data Scientist, Safety

Details

About the Team

OpenAI’s Safety teams work to ensure our products are safe, trusted, and resilient as frontier AI systems scale globally. We tackle some of the company’s most important challenges across understanding and preventing misuse and misalignment, intercepting fraud and abuse, and protecting vulnerable users.

We are hiring Data Scientists to help build the analytical foundations that allow OpenAI to deploy increasingly capable AI responsibly. We are hiring Data Scientists across several teams that contribute to safety in different ways, including:

• Safety Systems
• Integrity
• Product Policy

This is a high-impact role operating at the intersection of product, safety, policy, and research.

About the Role

As a Data Scientist, Safety, you will help solve complex and ambiguous problems where rigorous analysis directly informs critical decisions.

Depending on your background and team alignment, you may work on areas such as:

• Measure harmful or abusive behavior across OpenAI’s products
• Detect fraud, manipulation, 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, and help quantify and navigate false positive / 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 zero-to-one analytical systems in rapidly evolving domains

Requirements

We’re looking for strong Data Scientists who thrive in ambiguous, high-leverage environments.

You may be a fit if you have:

• 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 / Integrity
• Fraud & abuse
• Security analytics
• AI/ML model measurement and evaluation
• Alignment and AI safety research
• Biosecurity, synthetic biology, infectious diseases, or computational biology

Location

San Francisco or New York depending on team alignment and business need.

Compensation

Compensation Range: $230K - $325K USD

Benefits

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following 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 paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
• Mental health and wellness support
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
• Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.

This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.