Full Time

Abuse Investigator (CBRN) at OpenAI

Company OpenAI
Salary $230.4K – $425K
How You'll Work Remote
Level senior
Sector Technology
Posted Posted on March 8, 2026

Job Description

Compensation

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.

About the Team

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We believe that achieving our goal requires real world deployment and iteratively updating based on what we learn.

The Intelligence and Investigations team supports this by identifying and investigating misuses of our products – especially new types of abuse. This enables our partner teams to develop data-backed product policies and build scaled safety mitigations. Precisely understanding abuse allows us to safely enable users to build useful things with our products.

About the Role

As an Abuse Investigator on the Intelligence and Investigations team, you will be responsible for detecting misuse of our platform or services. Specifically, you will focus on cases where users attempt to use our platform in connection with prohibited activities such as developing or delivering biological and/or chemical threats to harm people, critical resources/infrastructure, or the environment. OpenAI has strict prohibitions and policies in this area, and you will detect, disrupt, and enforce on actors who violate our policies.

This role requires domain-specific expertise, experience investigating sophisticated threats, and the ability to navigate ambiguous signals in a complex and adversarial threat environment.

You will respond to time-sensitive escalations and will be expected to present your investigative work, both in writing and verbally, to key stakeholders across government, industry, and civil society, when required. You will also help inform the company’s evolving threat response and integrity monitoring and mitigation stack, while working closely on individual cases and enforcement assessments.

In this role, you will:

  • Detect, investigate, and disrupt the attempted misuse of OpenAI products for the development or dissemination of biological threats, including dual-use misuse and emerging biothreat vectors. You will also be expected to work across related domains (e.g., chemical threats).
  • Partner closely with teams across Policy, Legal, Integrity, Global Affairs, and Security to conduct robust investigations, including cross-internet and open-source research to trace and understand abuse and ensure OpenAI’s mitigations address evolving needs in the space.
  • Develop abuse signals and tracking strategies to proactively detect users attempting dual-use or biohazard-related misuse of our platform and review content for enforcement decisions.
  • Communicate findings from your investigations with internal stakeholders and leadership and, at times, external partners including regulatory or scientific organizations.
  • Develop a categorical understanding of our product surfaces in the biosecurity space, and work with teams to improve data visibility and internal tooling.

You might thrive in this role if you:

  • Have industry-leading experience in biosecurity, biological weapons non-proliferation, dual-use research of concern (DURC), or related biodefense fields,
  • Have strong familiarity with technical investigations, especially using SQL and Python, in a government/military and/or tech company
  • Have demonstrated experience in risk-mitigation (e.g., adversarial thinking and record of success in threat mitigation)
  • Have worked on investigations related to biological threat actors, malicious dual-use exploitation, or responsible innovation in synthetic biology or bioengineering
  • Have at least 5+ years of experience tracking misuse and/or abuse in biosecurity or life sciences domains, or equivalent education in these domains
  • Have at least 2 years of experience developing innovative detection solutions and conducting open-ended research to solve real-world problems
  • Experience in presenting analytical work in public or policy settings
  • Have experience scaling and automating processes, especially with language models

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. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see [OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf).

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protec

XML job scraping automation by YubHub

Similar Jobs

Full Time

Chief of Staff

Sphere
San Francisco HQ
More Info
Full Time

Founding Growth Lead

Sphere
San Francisco HQ
More Info
Full Time

Senior Full Stack Engineer

Sphere
San Francisco HQ
More Info
Full Time

Lead AI Engineer

Sphere
San Francisco HQ
More Info
Full Time

Senior Backend Engineer (Infrastructure)

Sphere
San Francisco HQ
More Info
Full Time

Founding Product Engineer

Sphere
San Francisco HQ
More Info

Receive the latest articles in your inbox

Join the Houtini Newsletter

Practical AI tools, local LLM updates, and MCP workflows straight to your inbox.