Strategic Operations Lead, User Safety & Risk Operations

Details

At OpenAI, the User Safety & Risk Operations (USRO) team protects products and users from abuse, fraud, safety risks, and other forms of misuse. This role sits on a new USRO team focused on building operational capacity for new, ambiguous, or fast-moving areas of work. The team defines what needs to be built, creates operating models to support it, and partners with other teams to make work scalable and durable.

Location: San Francisco, CA — hybrid, 3 days/week in-office.

Responsibilities

• Lead strategic operational builds from ambiguous problem statements to implemented operating models, including scope, owners, workflows, milestones, risks, and success measures.
• Build launch and early-life operating models for complex partner deployments (monitoring cadence, escalation paths, ownership maps, reporting expectations, follow-up mechanisms).
• Translate technical, policy, safety, privacy, and operational constraints into practical workflows that teams can execute.
• Define how safety and risk signals should be monitored, reviewed, packaged, escalated, and tracked through resolution.
• Partner with senior leaders across USRO and cross-functional teams (Product, Engineering, Legal, Policy, Support, Partnerships, Operations) to translate business, product, safety, and operational needs into execution plans.
• Use data and operational signals to understand workflow health, capacity needs, bottlenecks, quality gaps, and risks.
• Identify where AI tools, automation, lightweight systems, or better workflows can reduce operational burden and improve consistency.
• Keep operating models current as data pipelines, tooling, dashboards, partner processes, and ownership mature.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in operations, strategy and operations, product operations, technical program management, trust and safety operations, risk operations, implementation or management consulting, or a related field.
• Proven track record of leading complex, ambiguous work from problem framing through execution.
• Strong technical fluency: ability to reason through data flows, system ownership, logs, dashboards, tooling gaps, and failure modes.
• Strong data literacy and experience using SQL, spreadsheets, dashboards, and metrics to analyze workflows, assess risk, identify gaps, and drive decisions.
• Comfortable operating where data access, tooling, ownership, or policy thresholds are incomplete or changing.
• Experience working closely with Product, Engineering, Data Science, and technical operations teams; translating technical constraints into operational requirements.
• Pragmatic sequencing and launch-readiness judgment: know what must be ready for launch, what can be monitored before action, and what needs to become durable over time.
• AI-fluent, with experience using AI tools to move faster, improve quality, or create operational leverage.
• Strong interpersonal judgment and stakeholder management across teams; implementation-oriented and comfortable building workflows and SOPs.
• Able to operate at a fast pace while staying organized and effective in high-ambiguity environments.

Nice to Have

• Experience supporting cloud, enterprise, infrastructure, platform, or partner-hosted deployments.
• Experience building launch-readiness or post-launch monitoring processes for complex technical programs.
• Experience designing workflows that include escalation paths, QA, capacity planning, reporting, and long-term ownership transitions.
• Experience in implementation-focused consulting, product operations, TPM, or strategy and operations with execution-oriented outcomes.
• Experience prototyping lightweight tools, automations, dashboards, or workflow improvements using AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Codex), low-code/no-code platforms, SQL, spreadsheets, or scripting.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company emphasizes safety, diverse perspectives, and equitable hiring practices. Background checks are administered per applicable law. Reasonable accommodations are provided for applicants with disabilities.

Benefits & Compensation

• Compensation range (base): $252K–$335K; offers equity and additional compensation components based on role and location.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts (Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, commuter expenses).
• 401(k) with employer match.
• Paid parental leave; paid medical and caregiver leave; flexible PTO; paid company holidays.
• 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.
• Additional taxable fringe benefits (charitable donation matching, wellness stipends) as applicable.