Engineering Manager (AI Safety)

Location: San Francisco, CA, United States; hybrid work model with 3 days in the office per week. Relocation assistance is offered to new employees.

Base salary: $445,000–$510,000 annually for L6, plus equity, eligible performance bonuses, and benefits.

Company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company building general-purpose artificial intelligence systems with a focus on safe deployment.

What you will do

• Lead software engineers building detection and mitigation systems for harmful frontier model use.
• Set the technical roadmap and execution strategy, including prioritization, system design, delivery, iteration, and impact measurement.
• Build production services, pipelines, tooling, instrumentation, and automation that scale with frontier model usage.
• Partner with Research and Product to translate evolving model capabilities into tests, signals, and deployable mitigations.
• Drive architecture, reliability, monitoring, performance, and operational excellence.
• Hire and develop teams across backend, data systems, and applied ML engineering, while anticipating scale-related failures in agentic workflows.

Requirements

• Significant experience leading engineering teams and delivering production systems end-to-end.
• Strong technical judgment in system design, distributed systems, data pipelines, observability, and operational reliability.
• Demonstrated ability to partner with Research, Product, and Security to ship systems that materially reduce risk or abuse at scale.
• Experience building systems in adversarial, fast-evolving environments.
• Ability to operate in high-context environments and remain comfortable with ambiguity and novelty.
• Clear communication and the ability to build trust quickly with senior stakeholders; a pragmatic, collaborative, and calm approach under scrutiny.

Nice to have

• Background in autonomy, high-scale real-time systems, or intelligence-adjacent technical domains.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work model with three office days per week in San Francisco.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, including employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• 401(k) plan with employer match, flexible or accrued paid time off, paid holidays, parental, medical, caregiver, sick, and safe leave.
• Mental health and wellness support, life and disability coverage, and commuter benefits.
• Annual learning and development stipend, office meals, eligible meal delivery credits, and relocation support.

Hiring process

• More details about benefits are provided during the hiring process.
• Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law for US-based candidates.