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 helps define how OpenAI enables legitimate life sciences, biomedical, and public health work while reducing the risk that products are misused to create biological harm. The role sits at the intersection of AI capability, life sciences practice, biosecurity, biosafety, and abuse prevention.

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 biological risk into practical product policy, implementation standards, access criteria, enforcement guidance, and launch decisions.

The role requires understanding 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. Strong candidates may bring depth in 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. 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.

Responsibilities

• 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 needs of legitimate scientific users.
• Evaluate bio-relevant product launches and model capabilities for beneficial and misuse risks across public health, clinical education, drug discovery, and other life sciences use cases.
• Translate biological misuse risk into 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 boundaries between broadly beneficial assistance, higher-risk dual-use support, and restricted or disallowed activity.
• Develop operationalizable standards, enforcement protocols, and escalation paths for bio misuse scenarios, including suspicious high-risk dual-use trajectories and account- or organization-level misuse patterns.
• 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.
• Help design and refine trusted access frameworks for higher-capability biological systems (actor vetting, institutional legitimacy, governance expectations, access scoping, re-verification, escalation obligations).
• Support development of threat models, misuse trajectories, taxonomy updates, account-level review workflows, and measurement approaches to distinguish legitimate activity from concerning misuse.
• Use production signals, evals, red-team findings, user feedback, and operational data to improve policy quality and measure safeguard effectiveness.
• Engage with life sciences organizations, biosecurity experts, public health institutions, and other external stakeholders on best practices for safe AI adoption in biology.
• Build partnership-informed biosecurity approaches with external experts and trusted partners to identify emerging risks and strengthen safe adoption practices.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience, or equivalent depth, in one or more of: biosecurity, biosafety, life sciences R&D, synthetic biology, molecular biology, computational biology, public health, biodefense, or biological risk management, or in product policy, trust and safety, abuse investigations, or a closely related field.
• Strong technical fluency in one or more biological or biosecurity domains (examples listed include synthetic biology, molecular biology, genomics, bioinformatics, protein engineering, lab automation, pathogen surveillance, sequence screening, institutional biosafety, biological threat assessment, or life sciences research governance).
• Understanding of modern biological risk landscape and how institutions govern sensitive work.
• Ability to evaluate dual-use biological capabilities with nuance and to reason about actor, environment, and trajectory (not just prompt content).
• Experience turning ambiguous scientific and security questions into practical policy frameworks, access criteria, taxonomies, review rubrics, launch recommendations, and operational guidance.
• Strong communication skills for working with product managers, engineers, researchers, executives, safety and security practitioners, life sciences customers, and policy stakeholders.
• Use of data, expert judgment, operational signals, and user feedback to improve policy quality and evaluate safeguards.
• Experience building cross-sector partnerships or strategies connecting technical policy, public health, biosecurity, and institutional governance.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and 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) and paid medical/caregiver leave.
• Paid time off (flexible PTO for exempt employees; up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees), 13+ paid company holidays, and additional 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 and additional taxable fringe benefits (charitable donation matching, wellness stipends).

Location & Work Type

• San Francisco, United States. Hybrid workplace.

Compensation

• Base compensation range listed: $261K - $290K (USD). In addition to base pay, total compensation may include equity, performance-related bonus(es), and the benefits listed above.