Head of Preparedness

Details

About the team

The Safety Systems team ensures that OpenAI’s most capable models can be responsibly developed and deployed. We build evaluations, safeguards, and safety frameworks that help our models behave as intended in real-world settings.

OpenAI has invested deeply in Preparedness across multiple generations of frontier models, building core capability evaluations, threat models, and cross-functional mitigations. As we expect model capabilities to continue to increase and we continue implementing increasingly complex safeguards, this work remains a major priority. The Head of Preparedness will expand, strengthen, and guide this program so our safety standards scale with the capabilities of the systems we develop.

About the role

As the Head of Preparedness, you will lead the technical strategy and execution of OpenAI’s Preparedness framework — the framework explaining OpenAI’s approach to tracking and preparing for frontier capabilities that create new risks of severe harm. You will be the directly responsible leader for building and coordinating capability evaluations, threat models, and mitigations that form a coherent, rigorous, and operationally scalable safety pipeline.

This role requires deep technical judgment, clear communication, and the ability to guide complex work across multiple risk domains. You will lead a small, high-impact team to drive core Preparedness research, while partnering broadly across Safety Systems and OpenAI for end-to-end adoption and execution of the framework.

Responsibilities

• Own OpenAI’s preparedness strategy end-to-end by building capability evaluations, establishing threat models, and building and coordinating mitigations.
• Lead the development of frontier capability evaluations, ensuring they are precise, robust, and scalable across rapid product cycles.
• Oversee mitigation design across major risk areas (e.g., cyber, bio), ensuring safeguards are technically sound, effective, and aligned with underlying threat models.
• Guide interpretation of evaluation results and ensure they directly inform launch decisions, policy choices, and safety cases.
• Refine and evolve the preparedness framework as new risks, capabilities, or external expectations emerge.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with research, engineering, product teams, policy monitoring and enforcement teams, governance, and external partners to integrate preparedness into real-world deployment.

Requirements

• Deep technical expertise in machine learning, AI safety, evaluations, security, or adjacent risk domains.
• Experience designing or executing high-rigor evaluations for complex technical systems.
• Comfortable making clear, high-stakes technical judgments under uncertainty.
• Strong communication skills and demonstrated ability to align diverse stakeholders around safety decisions.
• Experience managing or leading technical teams, or driving cross-functional initiatives in research-intensive environments.
• Ability to balance scientific depth with operational realities — shipping high-quality work on tight timelines in fast-moving contexts.
• Nice to have: experience in threat modeling, cybersecurity, biosecurity, misalignment/deception, or other frontier-risk domains.

Compensation & Benefits

• Estimated base salary: $555,000 (tier listed: $555K • Offers Equity). Total compensation also includes generous equity and 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 (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 coordinated office closures, plus paid sick or safe time as required by local 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 (charitable donation matching, wellness stipends) may be provided.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of AI capabilities and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. We are an equal opportunity employer and provide reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities. Background checks will be administered consistent with applicable law, and more details (including policies) are available to candidates during the hiring process.