Data Scientist, Preparedness

About the Position

Data Scientist, Preparedness

Join the Preparedness team at OpenAI to help build, evaluate, and continuously improve mitigations that prevent extreme harms from AI systems. This role is for an experienced, highly autonomous individual contributor who can take ambiguous problem statements, structure rigorous analyses, and translate findings into actionable product and policy changes.

Location

• San Francisco, California, United States

Employment Type

• Full-time

Compensation

• $345K – $385K • 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.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate and improve mitigation systems, including classifiers and detection pipelines across domains (e.g., biosecurity, cybersecurity, and emerging risk areas).
• Diagnose false positives and false negatives with deep error analysis, root cause investigation, and clear recommendations for mitigation adjustments.
• Build monitoring and measurement frameworks to track mitigation effectiveness over time and across user segments and use cases.
• Identify trends in over-blocking vs. under-blocking, quantify customer impact, and propose prioritized interventions.
• Develop insights from customer feedback, complaints, and usage patterns to detect shifts in adversarial behavior and system failure modes.
• Expand risk monitoring into new areas, including cybersecurity threats and model loss-of-control or sabotage scenarios, in partnership with domain experts.
• Communicate results to technical and executive stakeholders with crisp narratives, decision-ready metrics, and clear tradeoffs.

Requirements

• Significant experience in data science or applied analytics in high-stakes domains (e.g., security, trust & safety, abuse prevention, fraud, platform integrity, or reliability).
• Strong foundations in experimentation, causal thinking, and/or observational inference; ability to design robust measurement under imperfect data.
• Fluency in SQL and Python (or equivalent) for analysis, modeling, and building monitoring workflows.
• Experience building metrics, dashboards, and operational monitoring that meaningfully changes outcomes (not just reporting).
• Track record of driving cross-functional impact with engineering, product, and research partners.

Nice to Have

• Cybersecurity data science experience (strong preference), including exposure to threat modeling, adversarial dynamics, abuse patterns, or security telemetry.
• Experience with classifier evaluation, calibration, thresholding, and error analysis at scale. Familiarity with detection systems in adversarial settings (e.g., evasion, distribution shift, feedback loops).
• Trust & Safety experience is helpful, but not required.
• Genuine interest in AI safety, alignment, and catastrophic risk prevention.

We Offer

• 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.

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. The mission of the Preparedness team is to:

1. 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.
2. 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 Company

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 to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.