Research Program Manager, Safety Systems

The role

You will lead programs that develop and improve safeguards for models and products, or assess and mitigate risks associated with frontier capabilities. You will partner with researchers, engineers, and stakeholders to shape technical roadmaps and coordinate execution.

What you will do

• Shape safety programs and technical roadmaps.
• Partner with research and engineering leads to define goals, milestones, dependencies, and success criteria.
• Drive safeguards development and deployment.
• Coordinate evaluations and safety assessments.
• Drive safety readiness and trusted-access programs.
• Turn findings into improvements by triaging safeguard gaps, jailbreaks, and overflagging.
• Strengthen the evidence behind safety decisions.
• Build programs that scale across products.

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in technical safety work, owning technical programs, or related roles in fast-moving environments.
• Led complex research or technical programs involving researchers and engineers, particularly in AI, cybersecurity, biosafety, or another field where failures can have serious consequences.
• Understand frontier AI safety concepts, including capability evaluations, alignment, control, monitoring, and safeguard robustness.
• Can assess what evaluation results do and do not establish, including methodological limitations, uncertainty, and the difference between model capability and real-world risk.
• Can turn ambiguous questions into clear programs, make practical tradeoffs, and adjust priorities as evidence changes.
• Have worked extensively across research, engineering, and product teams and can coordinate with policy and communications partners.
• Exercise sound judgment when findings are concerning or incomplete, raise unresolved risks constructively, and communicate complex technical work clearly.
• Are motivated to help ensure increasingly capable AI systems remain beneficial and under meaningful human control.

Benefits

• Relocation assistance

Before you apply

• Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law.

About the company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. They push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through their products.