Data Scientist, Preparedness (AI Safety)

Location: San Francisco, United States

Salary: $265K–$380K plus equity

Company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company focused on developing and safely deploying general-purpose artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity.

What you will do

• Evaluate and improve mitigation systems, including classifiers and detection pipelines for biosecurity, cybersecurity, and emerging risks.
• Perform deep error analysis and root-cause investigations of false positives and false negatives, then recommend mitigation adjustments.
• Build monitoring and measurement frameworks to track mitigation effectiveness across time, user segments, and use cases.
• Analyze over-blocking, under-blocking, customer feedback, complaints, and usage patterns to identify trends and prioritize interventions.
• Expand risk monitoring into cybersecurity, model loss-of-control, and sabotage scenarios with domain experts.
• Communicate decision-ready metrics, tradeoffs, and recommendations to technical and executive stakeholders.

Requirements

• Significant experience in data science or applied analytics in high-stakes domains such as security, trust and safety, abuse prevention, fraud, platform integrity, or reliability.
• Strong foundations in experimentation, causal thinking, and/or observational inference, with the ability to design robust measurement under imperfect data.
• Fluency in SQL and Python or equivalent tools for analysis, modeling, and monitoring workflows.
• Experience building metrics, dashboards, and operational monitoring that meaningfully changes outcomes.
• Track record of cross-functional impact with engineering, product, and research partners.
• Ability to work autonomously, structure ambiguous analyses end to end, communicate concisely to executives, and turn analysis into product changes.
• Experience with classifier evaluation, calibration, thresholding, and error analysis at scale, including detection systems exposed to evasion, distribution shift, or feedback loops.
• Genuine interest in AI safety, alignment, and catastrophic risk prevention.

Nice to have

• Cybersecurity data science experience, including threat modeling, adversarial dynamics, abuse patterns, or security telemetry.
• Trust and Safety experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time employment with equity compensation.
• Work within the Preparedness team in the Safety Systems organization on frontier AI risk mitigation.
• Equal opportunity employment with reasonable accommodations available for applicants with disabilities.
• Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law, including relevant fair-chance requirements for US-based candidates.