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

Details

At OpenAI, the User Safety & Risk Operations (USRO) team helps protect products and users from abuse, fraud, safety risks, and other misuse. This role sits on a team focused on building operational capacity for new, ambiguous, and fast-moving areas of work: defining what needs to be built, creating the operating model to support it, and working with partner teams to make the work scalable and durable over time.

This is a senior individual-contributor role to build the safety operating model for a new category of consumer hardware. You will translate emerging product risks and incomplete requirements into practical workflows, controls, launch plans, and durable systems. The role may involve exposure to sensitive or concerning material and requires strong discretion, judgment, and resilience.

Location / work model: San Francisco, CA; hybrid, 3 days/week in-office.

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 clear 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 USRO and partner teams.

Requirements

• 8+ years of relevant experience in device safety, product safety, consumer hardware operations, technical program management, or related fields.
• Experience building a complex safety or risk program from an ambiguous starting point through launch and scaled operation.
• Experience handling high-severity incidents, regulated workflows, sensitive customer information, and time-critical escalations.
• Ability to translate product, engineering, legal, privacy, and policy constraints into workflows that operational teams can execute.
• Technical fluency to reason through data flows, telemetry, access controls, audit logs, case systems, automation, and failure modes.
• Use data to assess workflow health, identify emerging patterns, evaluate quality, and make risk-based decisions.
• Ability to establish clear accountability across teams with overlapping responsibilities and different risk tolerances.
• Balance launch speed with safety controls, monitoring, rollback criteria, and longer-term system development.
• Strong communication with operational, technical, legal, and executive audiences when evidence is incomplete or tradeoffs are difficult.
• Practical orientation and willingness to build and operate workflows, not 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 pay range: $252,000–$335,000 (role also offers equity).
• 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) 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 coordinated office closures; 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 meals in offices and meal delivery credits as eligible.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional taxable fringe benefits such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.