Technical Lead Manager, Data Engineering, Trust & Safety

Details

The Applied team brings OpenAI’s technology to the world through products used by hundreds of millions of people and by developers and businesses building on its APIs. The Trust & Safety Data Engineering team builds data foundations that help OpenAI understand, detect, investigate, and mitigate abuse and safety risks across its products.

About the Role

OpenAI is hiring a Technical Lead Manager to lead and grow the Trust & Safety Data Engineering team. This is a hands-on leadership role involving strategy, data architecture, senior stakeholder alignment, engineering coaching, and execution on high-impact data systems.

The team will build durable, reusable, privacy-safe data foundations for risk detection, abuse investigations, operational workflows, safety model development and evaluation, intervention measurement, product launch readiness, and platform integrity reporting.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a high-performing Trust & Safety Data Engineering team.
• Define the roadmap and technical strategy for Trust & Safety data systems.
• Build canonical, privacy-safe datasets and pipelines for abuse detection, fraud detection, risk signals, enforcement, scaled review, transparency reporting, and safety monitoring.
• Create reusable foundations for Trust & Safety model development, including features, labels, training data, backtesting, evaluation, and production inputs.
• Establish ownership, documentation, data quality standards, monitoring, and operational rigor for critical datasets and workflows.
• Reduce dependence on sensitive raw logs by building structured alternatives with appropriate access controls, retention, deletion semantics, and governance.
• Partner with Trust & Safety, Product, Policy, Privacy, Data Science, Engineering, and Data Platform teams on launch readiness, operational systems, and safety measurement.
• Raise the bar for technical judgment, prioritization, communication, and execution in a fast-moving environment.

Requirements

• 15+ years of experience in data engineering and experience leading teams that build and operate production data systems at scale.
• Experience in trust and safety, integrity, abuse prevention, fraud, investigations, risk operations, safety systems, privacy, or adjacent domains.
• Deep technical expertise in data architecture, modeling, pipelines, reliability, privacy, and operational tradeoffs.
• Experience with large-scale data systems such as Spark, Airflow or similar orchestration systems, distributed storage, batch and streaming pipelines, and modern warehouse patterns.
• A product-oriented approach to data, emphasizing reliability, documentation, governance, observability, discoverability, and repeated use.
• Ability to create clarity in ambiguous problem spaces and make principled tradeoffs quickly.
• Strong track record partnering with senior stakeholders across engineering, data science, operations, policy, privacy, product, or executive teams.
• Experience hiring, developing, and retaining senior engineers.
• Motivation to build systems that make frontier AI products safer and more trustworthy.

Nice to Have

• Experience supporting machine learning systems through feature engineering, training data, labels, model evaluation, or production model pipelines.
• Experience with launch readiness, monitoring, alerting, incident response, semantic layers, metrics governance, or executive-facing reporting.

Workplace And Location

This role is based at OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters. Relocation assistance is available to new employees. The role may involve work related to sensitive or concerning safety, abuse, fraud, or user-risk domains, requiring strong discretion, judgment, and resilience.

Compensation And Benefits

• Base salary: $385,000–$490,000 per year.
• Equity, performance-related bonuses for eligible employees, and benefits.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health and dependent care expenses, parking, and transit.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, company holidays, office closures, and paid sick or safe time as required by applicable law.
• Mental health and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily office meals and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional taxable fringe benefits may include charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.

OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer committed to reasonable accommodations and fair employment practices.