Data Scientist, Safety

Details

OpenAI’s Safety teams work to ensure our products are safe, trusted, and resilient as frontier AI systems scale globally. The team tackles challenges across preventing misuse and misalignment, intercepting fraud and abuse, and protecting vulnerable users. This role is a high-impact position at the intersection of product, safety, policy, and research.

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 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 (Ideal Candidate)

• 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, and domain experience such as biosecurity or computational biology.

Why This Role

• Work on mission-critical problems with world-level impact
• Help shape how frontier AI systems are deployed safely
• Operate with unusual ownership and visibility
• Solve novel problems where there are no existing playbooks
• Join highly collaborative teams working across OpenAI

Location

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

Compensation Range

$230,000 - $325,000 USD

Benefits & Other Notes

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses
• 401(k) with employer match
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave
• Paid time off and 13+ paid company holidays
• Mental health and wellness support; employer-paid 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 equity and performance-related bonuses may apply

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company emphasizes safety, diverse perspectives, and equal opportunity. Background checks will be administered in accordance with applicable law. Reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities are available.