Researcher, Automated Red Teaming

Details

About the team

The Safety Systems org ensures that OpenAI’s most capable models can be responsibly developed and deployed. We build evaluations, safeguards, and safety frameworks that help our models behave as intended in real-world settings.

The Preparedness team is an important part of the Safety Systems org at OpenAI and is guided by OpenAI’s Preparedness Framework. Frontiers AI models have the potential to benefit all of humanity, but also pose increasingly severe risks. To ensure that AI promotes positive change, the Preparedness team helps us prepare for the development of increasingly capable frontier AI models. This team is tasked with identifying, tracking, and preparing for catastrophic risks related to frontier AI models.

The mission of the Preparedness team is to:

• Closely monitor and predict the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems, with an eye towards risks whose impact could be catastrophic
• Ensure we have concrete procedures, infrastructure and partnerships to mitigate these risks and to safely handle the development of powerful AI systems

Preparedness tightly connects capability assessment, evaluations, and internal red teaming, and mitigations for frontier models, as well as overall coordination on AGI preparedness.

About the role

This role leads the Automated Red Teaming (ART) effort: building scalable, research-driven systems that continuously discover failure modes in our models and mitigations — and translate those findings into actionable, production-facing improvements. The goal is to maximize counterfactual reduction in expected harm by finding the highest-leverage, least-covered weaknesses early and reliably.

Responsibilities

• Own the research and technical direction for automated red teaming across catastrophic risk areas.
• Initial emphasis areas include:
  • Automated classifier jailbreak discovery (cyber and bio)
  • Automated bio threat-development elicitation (worst-feasible planning uplift)
  • Chain-of-thought monitoring evasion probing and adjacent loss-of-control evaluations
• Partner with vertical risk teams (Cyber, Bio, Loss of Control) to define threat models, prioritize targets, and land mitigations.
• Partner with the Classifiers team to turn discovered attacks into training data, evaluations, and measurable robustness gains.
• Work with product, engineering, and safety stakeholders to ensure ART outputs are operationally useful and production-facing.
• Build scalable automation and pipelines (not just prototypes) that run continuously and produce high-signal outputs.

Requirements / Qualities

• Strong motivation toward AI safety and reducing real-world catastrophic risk.
• Enjoy breaking systems responsibly and finding high-severity failure modes and turning them into concrete fixes.
• Strong applied research instincts, especially around evaluations: designing experiments that are reproducible, interpretable, and hard to fool.
• Hands-on experience with large language models (LLMs) and agents, including multi-turn behaviors, tool use, and how models adapt to constraints.
• Comfortable building scalable automation and production-adjacent systems.
• Solid software engineering fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, testing discipline).
• Ability to think in threat models and incentives, asking "what would an attacker do next?" and consider how systems fail under pressure.
• Ability to translate messy findings into action and communicate clearly with researchers, engineers, product, and policy teams.
• Focus on efficiency and prioritization; willing to deprioritize low-leverage work.

Nice to have

• Experience in adversarial ML, security research / red teaming, abuse prevention systems, or large-scale evaluation infrastructure.

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. OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides information about background checks and applicant accommodations in the hiring process.

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 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)