Model Policy Manager, Chemical & Biological Risk

Details

About the team

The Safety Systems team is at the forefront of OpenAI's mission to build and deploy safe AGI, driving the company's commitment to AI safety and fostering a culture of trust and transparency. 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. Key focus areas include catastrophic risk, mental health, teen safety and multimodal safety.

About the role

Providing access to powerful AI models introduces challenging questions around model safety: how to define safe behavior, how to make policy actionable and objective, and how to sustain replicability. This is a senior role that helps shape policy creation and development at OpenAI and ensures technologies do not create harm. The role is embedded in research teams and directly informs model training. This role is based in San Francisco, CA and uses a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. Relocation assistance is offered to new employees.

Responsibilities

• Design model policies that govern safe model behavior in an objective and defensible way (e.g., how should the model respond in risky/unsafe scenarios; defining what is unsafe; balancing safety with beneficial capabilities).
• Develop taxonomies that inform data collection campaigns, model behavior, and monitoring strategies while balancing utility and catastrophic risk prevention.
• Lead prioritization for safety efforts across the company for new model launches, understanding and addressing technical and business trade-offs.
• Develop a broad range of subject-matter expertise and maintain agility across topics.
• Work across many internal teams, requiring high organizational acumen and confident decision-making.

Requirements

• Extensive experience researching or working with LLMs, machine learning, AI, or tech policy; strong preference for experience with moral reasoning or classification problems.
• Extensive experience defining, refining, and enforcing policies for ML models across training, evaluation, and deployment.
• Understanding of practical challenges translating policy into model behavior across the full training stack and ability to incorporate those constraints into policy design.
• Ability to reason about benefits and risks in open-ended problem spaces, generate novel approaches under ambiguity, and take ownership of end-to-end solutions from concept through execution.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration, prioritization, and organizational skills.

Most relevant publications / resources

• Introducing HealthBench
• Preparing for future AI capabilities in biology
• Safety evaluations hub
• OpenAI GPT5 System Card
• Evaluating Fairness in ChatGPT
• Improving Model Safety Behavior with Rule-Based Rewards
• OpenAI Model Spec

Benefits and other details

• Base salary range: $207K - $295K (offers equity).
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer HSA contributions.
• Pre-tax accounts (Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, commuter expenses).
• 401(k) with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical and caregiver leave; flexible PTO / paid time off.
• 13+ paid company holidays and additional company office closures; paid sick/safe time as required by law.
• Mental health and wellness support; employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning & development stipend; daily meals in offices and meal delivery credits as eligible.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Background checks administered in accordance with applicable law; reasonable accommodations available for applicants with disabilities.

Location & work model: San Francisco, CA; hybrid (3 days in office per week).