Product Policy, Biosecurity Policy Manager

Details

About the Team

The Product Policy team develops, implements, enforces, and communicates the policies that govern use of OpenAI’s services, including ChatGPT, Codex, GPTs, and the OpenAI API. This biosecurity-focused role will help define how OpenAI enables legitimate life sciences, biomedical, and public health work while reducing the risk that our products are misused to create biological harm.

This role sits at the intersection of AI capability, life sciences practice, biosecurity, biosafety, and abuse prevention: helping researchers, institutions, and other legitimate users benefit from OpenAI’s tools while setting clear boundaries against activity that could enable catastrophic biological misuse or other harmful bio-related outcomes.

About the Role

As a Product Policy Manager specializing in Biosecurity, you will combine deep biological, biosecurity, and policy judgment to guide how OpenAI evaluates, launches, and governs capabilities relevant to biology and the life sciences. You will work closely with product, engineering, research, safety, security, legal, operations, global affairs, and go-to-market teams to translate complex biological risk into practical product policy, implementation standards, access criteria, enforcement guidance, and launch decisions.

The role requires understanding both sides of the bio equation: how legitimate researchers, clinicians, public health practitioners, and life sciences organizations use AI to advance beneficial work, and how malicious or irresponsible actors may attempt to misuse AI systems to lower barriers to harmful biological activity. Strong candidates may bring depth in one or more relevant domains, such as biosecurity, biosafety, synthetic biology, molecular biology, computational biology, bioinformatics, public health, biodefense, biological risk management, sequence screening, lab automation, institutional research governance, or life sciences R&D — along with the ability to reason across adjacent areas.

You do not need to have held a formal policy title, but you should have experience turning complex technical or scientific risk into durable rules, standards, processes, or decisions, and very strong communication skills.

As OpenAI continues to grow its capabilities in biology and the life sciences, this role will help align diverse teams and stakeholders while operating in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment.

In this role, you will

• Provide biosecurity and life sciences policy advice to technical and product teams based on an understanding of model capabilities, biological R&D workflows, abuse pathways, and the practical needs of legitimate scientific users.
• Evaluate bio-relevant product launches and model capabilities, including how they may support beneficial biological research, public health, clinical education, drug discovery, biosecurity, and other life sciences use cases, as well as how they could be misused by malicious or irresponsible actors.
• Translate biological misuse risk into clear product requirements, launch guidance, enforcement standards, user-facing policy, internal implementation guidance, and reviewer SOPs.
• Help define scalable policy frameworks for dual-use biological capabilities, including where to draw boundaries between broadly beneficial biological assistance, higher-risk dual-use support, and activity that should be restricted or disallowed.
• Develop operationalizable standards, enforcement protocols, and escalation paths for bio misuse scenarios, including suspicious high-risk dual-use trajectories, account- or organization-level misuse patterns, and ambiguous cases requiring expert judgment.
• Partner with Preparedness, Safety Systems, Integrity, User Operations, I2, research, legal, communications, global affairs, and product teams to make principled, timely decisions about biological risk in high-ambiguity situations.
• Help design and refine trusted access frameworks for higher-capability biological systems, including actor vetting, institutional legitimacy, governance expectations, deployment suitability, access scoping, re-verification, and escalation obligations.
• Support the development of threat models, misuse trajectories, taxonomy updates, account-level review workflows, and measurement approaches that distinguish legitimate scientific activity from concerning misuse over time.
• Use production signals, evals, red-team findings, user feedback, and operational data to improve policy quality, measure safeguard effectiveness, and identify emerging risks.
• Help OpenAI engage credibly with life sciences organizations, biosecurity experts, public health institutions, and other external stakeholders on best practices for safe AI adoption in biology.
• Develop a partnership-informed biosecurity approach by working with external experts, public health institutions, life sciences organizations, and other trusted partners to identify emerging risks, strengthen safe adoption practices, and support broader societal resilience against biological misuse.

You might thrive in this role if you

• Have 7+ years of experience, or equivalent depth, in one or more of the following areas: biosecurity, biosafety, life sciences R&D, synthetic biology, molecular biology, computational biology, public health, biodefense, or biological risk management, as well as product policy, trust and safety, abuse investigations, or a closely related field.
• Bring strong technical fluency in one or more biological or biosecurity domains, such as synthetic biology, molecular biology, genomics, bioinformatics, protein engineering, lab automation, pathogen surveillance, sequence screening, institutional biosafety, biological threat assessment, or life sciences research governance.
• Understand the modern biological risk landscape, including how legitimate biological research is conducted, how institutions govern sensitive work, and where AI systems may create both meaningful scientific value and misuse risk.
• Can evaluate dual-use biological capabilities with nuance, distinguishing between legitimate scientific work, lower-risk educational or analytical assistance, ambiguous high-friction cases, irresponsible activity, and harmful misuse.
• Think in terms of actor, environment, and trajectory — not just prompt content — when assessing risk, including who the user is, what institution they belong to, what governance they operate under, and what pattern of behavior is emerging over time.
• Are comfortable turning ambiguous scientific and security questions into practical policy frameworks, access criteria, taxonomies, review rubrics, launch recommendations, and operational guidance.
• Communicate clearly with product managers, engineers, researchers, executives, safety experts, security practitioners, life sciences customers, and policy stakeholders.
• Use data, expert judgment, operational signals, and user feedback to improve policy quality and evaluate whether safeguards are working in practice.
• Are energized by building new frameworks in an emerging area where the right answer may require balancing scientific progress, product usability, institutional trust, and high-consequence safety risk.
• Care deeply about enabling beneficial biology and life sciences work while preventing catastrophic misuse and unnecessary biological risk.
• Have experience building cross-sector partnerships or strategies that connect technical policy, public health, biosecurity, and institutional governance in service of broader societal resilience.

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 the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates.

Benefits

• 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 company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
• Mental health and wellness support
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
• Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends

More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.