Manager, Protection Scientist Engineer, Intelligence and Investigations

Details

About the Team

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Intelligence and Investigations team identifies and investigates misuses of our products—especially new types of abuse—to enable partner teams to develop data-backed product policies and build scaled safety mitigations.

About the Role

Protection Science Engineering is an interdisciplinary role mixing data science, machine learning, investigation, and policy/protocol development. As a manager of Protection Scientist Engineers, you will lead a small but growing team of PSEs who design and build systems to proactively identify and enforce on abuse on OpenAI’s products. This includes ensuring robust abuse monitoring for new products, sustaining monitoring for existing products, and prototyping and incubating defenses against high-risk harms. The team also responds to and investigates critical escalations not caught by existing safety systems. The team will leverage deep understanding of products and data and work cross-functionally with product, policy, and scaled engineering teams.

This role is based in our San Francisco office and may involve resolving urgent escalations outside of normal work hours. Some investigations and work may involve sensitive content, including sexual, child safety, violent, or otherwise disturbing material.

Responsibilities

• Lead, manage, and support an interdisciplinary and technical team across US timezones and help chart longer-term strategies.
• Leverage expertise in designing, launching, and improving systems of defense to mentor the team and develop technical and organizational solutions.
• Identify and create opportunities to enhance and make more efficient the team’s core work by understanding cross-functional and technical challenges.
• Review, and at times design and participate in, implementation of abuse detection, review, and enforcement for new product launches and major harms.
• Work with Product, Policy, Ops, and Investigative teams to understand key risks and address them, and with Engineering teams to ensure sufficient data and scaled tooling.
• Communicate the work of the team internally and at times externally, and coordinate with cross-functional partners to scope and prioritize work across abuse response.

Requirements

• At least two years of experience managing or tech-leading teams that fight threats at a tech company and/or government organization.
• Deep experience with technical analysis and harm detection, especially using SQL and Python.
• Experience in trust and safety and/or working closely with policy, enforcement, and engineering teams; an investigative mindset is essential.
• Experience with basic data engineering (building core tables, writing data pipelines in production) and familiarity with machine learning principles and execution.
• Basic software development skills; this role writes productionized code at times.
• Experience scaling and automating processes, especially with language models.
• Ability to respond to urgent escalations outside normal hours and to handle potentially sensitive and disturbing content as part of investigations.

Benefits

• Base pay range listed: $320K–$425K (may vary by market location and individual factors). Offers equity and potential 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 paid coordinated office closures, plus 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 (charitable donation matching, wellness stipends) may be provided.

Other Information

• Background checks will be administered in accordance with applicable law. OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities.