Technical Abuse Investigator at OpenAI

Location

San Francisco; New York City; Remote – US

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

Hybrid

Department

Intelligence & Investigations

Compensation

• $198K – $220K • 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.

• 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.

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

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We believe achieving this goal requires real-world deployment and continuous iteration based on how our products are used—and misused—in practice.

The Intelligence and Investigations team supports this mission by detecting, investigating, and disrupting the misuse of our products, particularly critical or novel harms. Our work enables partner teams to develop data-backed model policies and build scalable safety mitigations. By precisely understanding abuse, we help ensure OpenAI’s products can be used safely to build meaningful, rewarding applications.

About the Role

As a Technical Abuse Investigator on the Intelligence and Investigations team, you will be responsible for detecting, investigating, and disrupting malicious use of OpenAI’s platform. You will further scale parts of the investigative process to help our team disrupt harm at scale. This role combines traditional investigative judgment with strong technical fluency: much of the work involves navigating complex datasets to surface actionable abuse signals, not just reviewing individual reports.

In addition to conducting investigations directly, this role is explicitly designed to act as a force multiplier for the broader investigations team. You will be scaling or automating highly manual, important and nuanced processes. You will design and implement lightweight technical solutions—such as notebook templates, data pipelines or internal utilities—that enable specialized investigators to identify, track, and action abuse at a greater scale than a single investigator can currently achieve. Success in this role is measured not only by investigations completed, but by how effectively your work enables you and your team members to operate more efficiently and consistently.

You will work closely with engineering, legal, investigations, security, and policy partners to respond to time-sensitive escalations, investigate activity that falls outside existing safeguards, and translate investigative insights into scalable detection and enforcement strategies.

This role includes participation in an on-call rotation to handle urgent escalations outside of normal work hours. Some investigations may involve sensitive content, including sexual, violent, or otherwise disturbing material. This role will work PST and is open to remote work within the United States, though we heavily prefer candidates based in San Francisco or New York.

In this role, you will:

• Detect, investigate and disrupt abuse and harm with policy, legal, global affairs, security, and engineering teams via complex datasets.

• Develop and iterate on abuse signals and investigative methods, scaling one-off insights to reduce manual effort and expand coverage.

• Build and maintain lightweight technical solutions (e.g., SQL/ Python data pipelines, investigation templates, dashboards, or internal utilities) for investigators focused on specific harm domains.

• Develop a deep understanding of OpenAI’s products, data systems, and enforcement mechanisms, and collaborate with engineering and data teams to improve investigative tooling, data quality, and workflows.

• Communicate investigation findings effectively to internal stakeholders through written briefs, data-backed recommendations, and escalation summaries

• Rotate (in-frequently) into an incident response role that requires rapid threat triaging, investigation, mitigation, sound judgement and concise briefing to senior leadership.

• Be someone people enjoy working with.

• Proven ability to quickly learn new processes, systems and team dynamics while thriving in ambiguous, rapidly changing, and high-pressure environments.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have a strong background in computer science, software engineering, or a related field.
• Have experience with data analysis, machine learning, or other technical skills relevant to the role.
• Are able to work effectively in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.
• Are able to communicate complex technical information to non-technical stakeholders.
• Are able to work independently and as part of a team.
• Are able to adapt to changing priorities and deadlines.
• Are able to maintain confidentiality and handle sensitive information.
• Are able to work in a remote environment.