Model Policy Manager

Details

Our Safety Systems team is at the forefront of OpenAI's mission to build and deploy safe AGI, driving our commitment to AI safety and fostering a culture of trust and transparency.

Within Safety Systems, the Model Policy team aligns model behavior with desired human values and norms. The team co-designs policy with models and for models by driving rapid policy taxonomy iteration based on data and defining evaluation criteria for foundational models’ ability to reason about safety.

This role focuses on defining how OpenAI’s models should behave in high-risk or high-ambiguity contexts (for example, agentic systems, multimodal systems, user safety, privacy, and other emerging risk domains). You will work closely with research, engineering, product, preparedness, and operations teams to build policies that are technically grounded, measurable, and responsive to real-world risk.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain model policies across safety-relevant domains, including dual-use, agentic, and emerging frontier-risk areas.
• Translate risk and harm models into clear behavioral specifications, evaluation criteria, grading guidance, and system-level safeguards.
• Define practical boundaries between beneficial uses of AI and assistance that could materially enable harm, exploitation, misuse, or unsafe outcomes.
• Build policy artifacts that support model training, evaluation, and deployment; partner with safety researchers, engineers, product teams, and other stakeholders to operationalize policy into scalable model behavior and measurable safeguards.
• Use red-teaming results, deployment data, model failures, over-refusals, under-refusals, and ambiguous edge cases to improve policy and evaluation quality over time.
• Identify emerging capability areas where frontier AI systems could create new safety challenges or lower barriers to harm.
• Study real-world deployments to identify where model behavior succeeds, fails, or drifts from the intended safety posture.
• Combine longer-horizon safety research with hands-on launch and deployment work.
• Contribute to system cards, safety reports, policy documentation, launch reviews, and external communications on OpenAI's approach to model safety and risk mitigation.
• Design and run human data campaigns, including gold set construction, labeling guidance, calibration, adjudication, and eval coverage analysis, to ensure policies can be reliably measured and improved.

Requirements

• Strong judgment about how advanced AI systems may affect real-world risk, especially in ambiguous, fast-moving, or high-impact areas.
• Experience building or applying policies, taxonomies, harm models, threat models, or risk frameworks for complex technical, social, or adversarial systems.
• Ability to move across domains without being the deepest subject-matter expert in every area, while knowing when to seek expert input.
• Skill turning fuzzy questions into structured policy frameworks, evaluation criteria, operational guidance, and enforceable model behavior.
• Comfortable using empirical evidence (evaluations, red-teaming results, deployment observations, model failure modes) to inform policy decisions.
• Systems thinking across policy, data, graders, classifiers, training, deployment safeguards, measurement, monitoring, and escalation workflows.
• Technical judgment about what model behavior can realistically be trained, measured, evaluated, and enforced at scale.
• Ability to work across research, engineering, product, policy, domain experts, and operational teams and to write clearly about complex tradeoffs.
• Pragmatic approach to safety focused on reducing real-world risk while preserving legitimate, beneficial, and socially valuable uses of AI.
• Comfortable in fast-paced, collaborative research environments where priorities shift as models, evidence, and risks change.

Workplace & Location

• This role is based in OpenAI's San Francisco office and uses a hybrid model: three days in the office per week with optional work from home on Thursdays and Fridays.
• OpenAI offers relocation support to new employees.

Benefits

• Base pay range shown elsewhere; total compensation may include equity and performance-related bonuses.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts (Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, 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 company office closures.
• 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) as applicable.