Data Scientist, Safety Systems

Details

The Safety Systems team ensures the safety, robustness, and reliability of AI models and their deployment in the real world. Building on practical alignment work and applied safety efforts, Safety Systems addresses emerging safety issues and develops solutions to enable the safe deployment of advanced models and future AGI.

This role is based in OpenAI's San Francisco HQ. Relocation assistance is offered to new employees.

Responsibilities

• Establish a data-driven approach for understanding, evaluating, and monitoring the safety of production systems.
• Lead efforts to understand and measure the real-world safety impacts of OpenAI's current and upcoming products.
• Uncover and improve approaches to measuring and mitigating harm and abuse.
• Develop and implement statistical methods necessary to operationalize safety-related metrics and productionize those metrics.
• Provide direction, guidance, and coordination of projects across teams.
• Drive the definition, tracking, and operationalization of feature-, product-, and company-level metrics.
• Create and disseminate dashboards, reports, and tools that enable the team and company to answer safety-related questions independently.
• Develop a safety data flywheel and provide safety research with production insights/data for training and evaluation.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in a quantitative role navigating highly ambiguous environments (ideally as a founding data scientist or team lead at a hyper-growth product company or research organization).
• Proven leadership skills, including leading multiple data scientists and cross-functional teams.
• Expertise in defining and implementing metrics, with experience operationalizing new feature and product-level metrics from scratch.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to communicate with product managers, engineers, and executives.
• Strategic insights that extend beyond traditional statistical significance testing.
• Strong statistical background, including knowledge of sampling, regression, causal analysis, and more.

Nice to Have / Domain Experience

• Experience in trust and safety, integrity, anti-abuse, or related fields.
• Demonstrated prior experience in NLP, large language models, or generative AI.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company emphasizes safety, diverse perspectives, and equal opportunity hiring practices. Background checks will be administered in accordance with applicable law.

Benefits

• Base pay range: $255,000 – $405,000 per year (base pay may vary based on location, experience, and other factors). Offers equity and additional performance-related bonuses for eligible employees.
• 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 and paid medical/caregiver leave.
• 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.
• 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 and additional taxable fringe benefits (e.g., charitable donation matching, wellness stipends).