Technical Program Manager, AI Safety & Safeguards

Details

OpenAI's Technical Program Managers lead complex, high-stakes initiatives that turn safety commitments into deployed systems and measurable outcomes. This role drives product, platform, and safety initiatives across ChatGPT, API, enterprise, and related deployment environments, operating at the intersection of technical strategy and execution.

The role involves translating safety and product priorities into actionable plans, influencing architectural and operational decisions, and delivering capabilities across model, infrastructure, application, and platform layers. Focus areas may include sensitive or high-impact model deployments, cloud and API safeguards, violent-misuse prevention, detection and enforcement systems, platform safety solutions, and emerging-risk programs.

Responsibilities

• Partner with product, engineering, research, and design teams to shape technical roadmaps, platform direction, and safeguards priorities across ChatGPT, API, enterprise, and cloud environments.
• Translate product and safety objectives into execution plans balancing near-term delivery, long-term platform evolution, customer needs, and responsible deployment.
• Lead cross-functional programs end to end, from problem definition and technical design through implementation, launch, iteration, and operational follow-through.
• Own milestones, dependencies, risk mitigation, decision-making, and accountability across engineering, infrastructure, integrity, trust and safety, legal, policy, operations, and go-to-market teams.
• Partner with engineers on system architecture, public and internal APIs, cloud deployment patterns, platform integrations, operational failure modes, and technical tradeoffs.
• Drive the development, integration, or rollout of safeguards including model evaluations, post-training mitigations, classifiers, abuse detection, monitoring, enforcement workflows, human review, and agent-assisted review.
• Coordinate readiness for sensitive or high-impact deployments, including safety coverage, escalation paths, operational controls, and alignment with external cloud or enterprise partners.
• Identify emerging misuse and severe-harm risks and define ownership and response mechanisms across prevention, detection, investigation, enforcement, and continuous improvement.
• Establish metrics for program delivery, deployment readiness, safety effectiveness, operational quality, and user or developer experience.
• Represent customer and developer needs in technical and leadership decisions while balancing risk reduction, model usefulness, implementation complexity, speed, and scale.
• Communicate program health, risks, recommendations, and consequential tradeoffs to engineering teams, cross-functional partners, and executives.
• Improve delivery and safety outcomes through practical operating mechanisms, scalable tooling, and data- or AI-assisted workflows.

Requirements

• A strong track record of delivering high-impact technical programs across product, platform, API, infrastructure, machine learning, or safety domains.
• Strong technical judgment across distributed systems, cloud deployments, public or internal APIs, developer platforms, production machine learning, or scalable product architecture.
• Ability to engage credibly with engineers on system design, implementation tradeoffs, reliability, deployment constraints, and operational risks.
• Experience delivering platforms or developer-facing capabilities and understanding how technical decisions affect customer experience, developer experience, and product usefulness.
• Understanding of safety, integrity, or abuse-prevention systems, including evaluations, model guardrails, classifiers, monitoring, enforcement, investigations, and incident response.
• Strong program management discipline, including coordinating multiple workstreams, resolving complex dependencies, and turning ambiguity into accountable execution.
• Product judgment and the ability to balance user and customer needs with model usefulness, safety risk, technical complexity, and business priorities.
• Clear and empathetic communication with engineering teams, executives, policy and legal partners, and external stakeholders.
• Comfort owning high-stakes programs requiring executive presence, cross-organizational influence, and sound decisions under uncertainty.
• Relevant experience with sensitive deployments, major cloud providers, or serious-harm domains such as violent misuse, child safety, cybersecurity, or other emerging threats.
• A hands-on, curious approach and motivation to help ensure increasingly capable AI systems are deployed responsibly.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health, dependent care, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, paid company holidays, office closures, and sick or safe time.
• 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.
• Equity, performance-related bonuses for eligible employees, charitable donation matching, and wellness stipends may also be provided.

The role is based in San Francisco, California, and uses a hybrid work model requiring three days in the office per week. OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.