About the Position

Research Program Manager, Frontier Assurance

San Francisco

About the Team

The Frontier Assurance team brings independent scrutiny into OpenAI’s safety decisions and helps the public understand and assess our safety work. We lead third-party assessments and safeguard testing for OpenAI’s flagship launches, pilot new assurance mechanisms such as embedded auditing, run our misalignment disclosure process, and incorporate independent expert input as evidence for critical safety decisions.

About the Role

As a Research Program Manager on the Frontier Assurance team, you will build programs that bring independent expertise into frontier AI safety decisions and make the evidence behind those decisions understandable to the public. You will lead external research partnerships and third-party assessments, coordinate public safety documentation, and develop new approaches to independent scrutiny and transparency. Working across research, engineering, product, policy, and communications, you will help ensure external findings inform concrete decisions and that our public explanations accurately reflect the evidence, limitations, and remaining uncertainty.

Responsibilities

Design and run third-party assessment programs for frontier models and safeguards, including independent evaluations, adversarial testing, and new approaches such as embedded auditing. Work with researchers and external partners to define assessment questions, scope, access, timelines, and deliverables.
Build and manage strategic research partnerships with third-party evaluators, academic labs, and other independent experts, prioritizing expertise, independence, and diversity of perspectives. Enable rigorous research, including work that challenges internal assumptions.
Bring external findings to safety decision-makers and translate them into actionable recommendations for safeguards, deployment, product, and policy. Track follow-up actions and ensure partners understand how their input was considered.
Partner with research, product, policy, and communications teams to explain the evidence behind OpenAI’s safety approach: what we tested, what we learned, how findings shaped safeguards and deployment decisions, and where limitations and uncertainty remain. Translate complex technical results into accurate, accessible communication for expert and public audiences.
Lead public transparency programs, including system cards, summaries of third-party assessments, and updates on significant findings and follow-up actions. Develop approaches to sharing methods, results, and limitations while protecting privacy, security, and sensitive information.
Create channels for researchers and civil society to ask questions, provide feedback, and inform future assessments and transparency efforts, including beyond individual launches.
Own program goals, milestones, dependencies, and risks across assessment and transparency work, keeping internal and external stakeholders informed and resolving obstacles to execution.

Requirements

Understanding of AI evaluations and measurement, and ability to engage with technical teams on evaluation design and results.
Ability to interpret evaluation findings and communicate what they do and do not establish, including methodological limitations, uncertainty, and disagreement.
Experience building research partnerships and managing external stakeholders, especially academic researchers and independent experts.
Ability to synthesize technical and social science research into clear executive summaries and accessible explanations for public audiences.
Experience delivering technical publications or public reports across multiple contributors, and exercising judgment about what to share, with whom, and when.
Experience working cross-functionally across product, research, and engineering teams and coordinating complex programs with policy and communications partners.
Understanding of and interest in frontier AI safety and policy.

We Offer

Competitive salary
Hybrid work model (3 days in the office per week)
Relocation assistance for new employees

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.

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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.

Research Program Manager, Frontier Assurance

Job description