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 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.

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

Requirements

• Experience leading 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.
• Strong technical skills 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/streaming pipelines, and modern warehouse patterns.
• Ability to treat data as a product: reliable, documented, governed, observable, discoverable, and designed for 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.
• Strong discretion, judgment, and resilience for work related to sensitive or concerning safety, abuse, fraud, or user-risk domains.

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.

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.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre-tax accounts (Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, commuter expense accounts)
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Paid parental leave and paid medical/caregiver leave
• Paid time off (flexible PTO for exempt employees) and paid company holidays
• 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, etc.)