Location
San Francisco
Employment Type
Full time
Department
Safety Systems
Compensation
- Estimated Base Salary $207K – $295K • Offers Equity
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.
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Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
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Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
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401(k) retirement plan with employer match
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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)
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Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
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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)
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Mental health and wellness support
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Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
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Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
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Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
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Relocation support for eligible employees
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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.
About the Team
The Safety Systems team is at the forefront of OpenAI's mission to build and deploy safe AGI, driving our commitment to AI safety and fostering a culture of trust and transparency.
The Model Policy team aligns model behavior with desired human values and norms. We co-design policy with models and for models by driving rapid policy taxonomy iteration based on data and defining evaluation criteria for foundational models’ ability to reason about safety. Key focus areas include: catastrophic risk, mental health, teen safety and multimodal safety.
About the Role
Providing access to frontier AI systems raises complex questions around dual-use science and catastrophic risk. How should models respond to requests involving chemical synthesis, biological experimentation, or pathogen research? Where is the boundary between legitimate scientific inquiry and information that could enable misuse? How do we design policies that meaningfully reduce risk without unnecessarily restricting beneficial research?
This is a senior role in which you’ll help shape policy creation and development at OpenAI for addressing biological and chemical risks. You will develop structured policy frameworks and taxonomies to guide safe model behavior. This role sits at the intersection of biosecurity expertise, AI safety research, and policy design. You will help ensure that frontier AI systems can support beneficial life sciences research, such as drug discovery, public health, and biosafety, while reducing the risk that these capabilities could be misused.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role, you’ll:
- Design and maintain model policies governing chemical and biological risk, defining how models should safely handle dual-use scenarios.
- Develop structured taxonomies of chemical and biological risk that inform model training data, evaluation benchmarks, and safety monitoring systems.
- Translate biosecurity and chemical security expertise into actionable model behavior, working closely with research and engineering teams to operationalize policy in training and evaluation pipelines.
- Develop a broad range of subject matter expertise while maintaining agility across topics.
- Identify emerging risk vectors where frontier AI capabilities could meaningfully lower barriers to harmful activity and develop mitigation strategies.
- Engage with internal and external subject-matter experts in biosecurity, biodefense, and chemical safety to ensure policies reflect real-world risk landscapes.
You might thrive in this role if you:
- Have strong domain expertise in chemistry, biology, biosecurity, or related fields and are motivated to translate that expertise into principled, operational policies that scale to frontier AI systems.
- Have experience researching or working with LLMs, machine learning, AI governance, technology policy, or related areas, and enjoy tackling structured reasoning and classification problems—such as defining boundaries between legitimate scientific inquiry and potentially harmful applications.
- Have experience designing, refining, or enforcing policies or safeguards for complex systems, whether in AI/ML environments, scientific research governance, national security contexts, or other high-stakes technical domains.
- Are comfortable navigating ambiguous, high-stakes problem spaces, balancing risk reduction with the benefits of scientific openness and innovation.
- Enjoy building new frameworks from first principles, reasoning about open-ended problems, and generating novel approaches under uncertainty. You take ownership of problems end-to-end—from defining the conceptual framework through collaborating with research and engineering teams
