Technical Lead Manager, Data Engineering, Trust & Safety

Details

About the Team

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 our APIs. We work across research, engineering, product, policy, safety, and operations to deploy frontier AI systems responsibly and safely.

The Trust & Safety Data Engineering team builds the data foundations that help OpenAI understand, detect, investigate, and mitigate abuse and safety risks across our products. We partner with Integrity, Investigations, Safety Systems, Product Policy, Privacy, Data Science, Engineering, and Data Platform to create reliable, privacy-safe datasets and pipelines for fraud and abuse detection, enforcement workflows, safety measurement, ML feature generation, launch readiness, and transparency reporting.

About the Role

We are hiring a Technical Lead Manager to lead and grow the Trust & Safety Data Engineering team. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who can set strategy, shape data architecture, align senior stakeholders, coach engineers, and drive execution on high-impact data systems.

You will help turn fragmented launch and incident support into durable, reusable, privacy-safe data foundations that Trust & Safety teams can rely on. The systems your team builds will help OpenAI detect risk, investigate abuse, power operational workflows, develop and evaluate safety models, measure interventions, support product launches, and report accurately on platform integrity.

In This Role, You Will

• 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 on launch readiness, operational systems, and safety measurement.
• Raise the bar for technical judgment, prioritization, communication, and execution in a fast-moving environment.

You Might Thrive in This Role If You

• Have 15+ years of experience in data engineering and have led data engineering 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.
• Are deeply technical and comfortable with data architecture, modeling, pipelines, reliability, privacy, and operational tradeoffs.
• Have experience with large-scale data systems such as Spark, Airflow or similar orchestration systems, distributed storage, batch/streaming pipelines, and modern warehouse patterns.
• Think of data as a product: reliable, documented, governed, observable, discoverable, and designed for repeated use.
• Can create clarity in ambiguous problem spaces and make principled tradeoffs quickly.
• Have a strong track record partnering with senior stakeholders across engineering, data science, operations, policy, privacy, product, or executive teams.
• Have hired, developed, and retained senior engineers.
• Are motivated by building systems that make frontier AI products safer and more trustworthy.

Nice to Have

• Experience supporting ML 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 & Location

This role is based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.

Please note: this role may involve work related to sensitive or concerning safety, abuse, fraud, or user-risk domains. Strong discretion, judgment, and resilience are essential.

Compensation and Benefits (as provided)

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following 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, may also be provided

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

This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.