Device Safety & Risk Operations Specialist, User Safety & Risk Operations

Details

OpenAI’s User Safety & Risk Operations team protects products and users from abuse, fraud, safety risks, and other forms of misuse. The team translates user and operational signals into timely decisions, effective interventions, and improvements to systems.

This role focuses on building operational capacity for new, ambiguous, and fast-moving areas of work. The successful candidate will define operating models, create workflows and controls, and work with partner teams to make operations scalable and durable.

The Device Safety & Risk Operations Specialist will build the safety operating model for a new category of consumer hardware. This senior individual-contributor role requires turning emerging product risks and incomplete requirements into practical workflows, controls, launch plans, and durable systems. The role will define how product-safety incidents, critical escalations, regulated cases, and privacy-sensitive issues are identified, investigated, escalated, resolved, and analyzed for future improvement.

The position is based in San Francisco, California, with a hybrid work model requiring three days per week in the office. The role may involve exposure to sensitive or concerning material; strong discretion, judgment, and resilience are essential.

Responsibilities

• Build the end-to-end safety and risk operating model for new consumer hardware, from early requirements through launch and early-life operations.
• Define incident taxonomies, severity levels, decision rights, escalation criteria, response pathways, and closure standards.
• Develop operational playbooks for product-safety incidents, critical escalations, safety advisories, corrective actions, and other high-risk events.
• Design workflows for regulated and privacy-sensitive cases, including restricted handling, evidence requirements, auditability, and partner escalation.
• Translate safety and operational needs into requirements for tooling, case management, data access, monitoring, logging, and automation.
• Establish ownership boundaries across Product, Engineering, Legal, Privacy, Product Policy, Support, Product Quality, and other operational partners.
• Build launch-readiness plans, tabletop exercises, training, quality controls, reporting, and post-launch monitoring.
• Use operational data, customer signals, product telemetry, and case outcomes to identify patterns and improve upstream products and systems.
• Determine where AI and automation can improve triage, evidence assembly, consistency, and response while preserving appropriate human judgment.
• Stand up priority workflows, operate them through launch and early-life stabilization, and transition them into durable homes across User Safety & Risk Operations and partner teams.

Requirements

• 8 or more years of relevant experience in device safety, product safety, consumer hardware operations, technical program management, or a related field.
• Experience building a complex safety or risk program from an ambiguous starting point through launch and scaled operation.
• Understanding of high-severity incidents, regulated workflows, sensitive customer information, and time-critical escalations.
• Ability to translate product, engineering, legal, privacy, and policy constraints into executable operational workflows.
• Technical fluency in data flows, telemetry, access controls, audit logs, case systems, automation, and failure modes.
• Ability to use data to assess workflow health, identify emerging patterns, evaluate quality, and make risk-based decisions.
• Ability to establish accountability across teams with overlapping responsibilities and different risk tolerances.
• Ability to balance launch speed with safety controls, monitoring, rollback criteria, and longer-term system development.
• Clear communication skills for operational, technical, legal, and executive audiences when evidence is incomplete or tradeoffs are difficult.
• A practical approach and willingness to build workflows rather than only define strategy.

Nice to Have

• Experience supporting consumer hardware, connected devices, or products used in shared environments.
• Experience with product-safety investigations, recalls, field failures, safety advisories, or hazardous-product handling.
• Experience designing workflows involving privacy-sensitive sensor, diagnostic, media, or household data.
• Familiarity with warranty, repair, reverse logistics, identity recovery, fraud, or ownership disputes.
• Experience building vendor training, quality-assurance, incident-response, or specialist-review programs.

Benefits

• Base salary range of $252,000–$335,000 per year, plus equity and performance-related bonuses for eligible employees.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health and dependent care expenses, commuter expenses, parking, and transit.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental leave, medical leave, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, paid company holidays, office closures, and 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 office meals and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional benefits may include charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.