Research Program Manager (AI Safeguards)

Location: San Francisco, CA, with a hybrid schedule requiring 3 days in the office per week. Relocation assistance is available to new employees.

Base salary: $239,000–$328,000 per year, plus equity and performance-related bonuses for eligible employees.

Company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company developing general-purpose AI systems with a focus on safety and human benefit.

What you will do

• Define safety programs, technical roadmaps, goals, milestones, dependencies, and success criteria with research and engineering leads.
• Translate safety research into safeguards across models and products, tracking coverage, effectiveness, and improvement opportunities.
• Coordinate capability evaluations, alignment and control assessments, adversarial testing, safeguard stress-testing, and embedded safety assessments.
• Coordinate safety requirements and evidence for frontier model launches, deployments, and trusted-access decisions.
• Triage safeguard gaps, jailbreaks, and overflagging; manage remediation, regression testing, escalation paths, and accountable owners.
• Build safety cases, assessment reports, system cards, shared tooling, feedback workflows, and scalable safeguards across products.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in technical safety work, technical program ownership, or related roles in fast-moving environments.
• Experience leading complex research or technical programs involving researchers and engineers, particularly in AI, cybersecurity, biosafety, or another high-consequence field.
• Understanding of frontier AI safety concepts, including capability evaluations, alignment, control, monitoring, and safeguard robustness.
• Ability to assess what evaluation results establish and do not establish, including methodological limitations, uncertainty, and the difference between model capability and real-world risk.
• Ability to turn ambiguous questions into clear programs, make practical tradeoffs, and adjust priorities as evidence changes.
• Extensive collaboration across research, engineering, and product teams, including coordination with policy and communications partners.
• Sound judgment when findings are concerning or incomplete, with the ability to communicate complex technical work clearly and raise unresolved risks constructively.
• Motivation to help ensure increasingly capable AI systems remain beneficial and under meaningful human control.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work with regular office presence in San Francisco and relocation support for eligible employees.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts and access to FSA options.
• 401(k) plan with employer match, paid parental and caregiver leave, paid time off, company holidays, and paid sick or safe time.
• Mental health and wellness support, employer-paid life and disability coverage, and an annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily office meals, eligible meal delivery credits, commuter benefits, charitable donation matching, and wellness stipends may be available.