Threat Modeler, Preparedness
Location
San Francisco
Employment Type
Full time
Department
Safety Systems
Compensation
- $325K • 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 Preparedness team is an important part of the Safety Systems org at OpenAI, and is guided by OpenAI’s Preparedness Framework.
Frontier AI models have the potential to benefit all of humanity, but also pose increasingly severe risks. To ensure that AI promotes positive change, the Preparedness team helps us prepare for the development of increasingly capable frontier AI models. This team is tasked with identifying, tracking, and preparing for catastrophic risks related to frontier AI models.
The mission of the Preparedness team is to:
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Closely monitor and predict the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems, with an eye towards misuse risks whose impact could be catastrophic to our society
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Ensure we have concrete procedures, infrastructure and partnerships to mitigate these risks and to safely handle the development of powerful AI systems
Preparedness tightly connects capability assessment, evaluations, and internal red teaming, and mitigations for frontier models, as well as overall coordination on AGI preparedness. This is fast paced, exciting work that has far reaching importance for the company and for society.
About the Role
As a threat modeler, you will own OpenAI’s holistic approach to identifying, modeling, and forecasting frontier risks from frontier AI systems. This role ensures that our evaluation frameworks, safeguards, and taxonomies are robust, high-coverage, and forward-looking. You will help the company answer the “why” behind our most stringent risk-prevention efforts, shaping the rationale for prioritizing and mitigating risks across domains. You will serve as a central node connecting technical, governance, and policy perspectives on prioritization, focus and rationale on our approach to frontier risks from AI.
In this role, you will:
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Develop and maintain comprehensive threat models across all misuse areas (bio, cyber, attack planning, etc.)
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Develop plausible and convincing threat models across loss of control, self-improvement, and other possible alignment risks from frontier AI systems
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Forecast risks by combining technical foresight, adversarial simulation, and emerging trends
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Pair closely with technical partners on capability evaluations to ensure these map to and cover the gambit of severe risks differentially enabled by frontier AI systems
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Pair closely with Bio and Cyber Leads to size the remaining risk of the designed safeguards and translate threat models into actionable mitigation designs
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Act as the thought partner and explainer of “why” and “when” for high-investment mitigation efforts—helping stakeholders understand the rationale behind prioritization
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Serve as the central node connecting technical, governance, and policy perspectives on prioritization, focus and rationale on our approach to misuse risk
You might thrive in this role if you:
- Understand risks from frontier AI systems and have a strong grasp of AI alignment literature
Bring deep experience in threat modeling, risk analysis, or adversarial thinking (e.g., security, national security, or safety)
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Know how AI evaluations work and can connect eval results to both capability testing and safeguard sufficiency
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Enjoy working across technical and policy domains to drive rigorous, multidisciplinary risk assessments
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Communicate complex risks clearly and compellingly to both technical and non-technical audiences
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Think in systems and naturally anticipate second-order and cascading risks
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 that requires a deep understanding of the potential risks and benefits of AI.
