Data Scientist, Safety

📋 Description

• • OpenAI is seeking a highly analytical and impact-driven Data Scientist to join its Safety teams, a critical function dedicated to ensuring the responsible and ethical deployment of advanced AI systems globally. This role is pivotal in building the analytical infrastructure that underpins OpenAI's commitment to safety, trust, and resilience as frontier AI capabilities continue to scale. You will operate at the dynamic intersection of product development, safety protocols, policy formulation, and cutting-edge research, tackling some of the most significant challenges in AI safety, including the prevention of misuse and misalignment, the interception of fraudulent activities and abuse, and the protection of vulnerable user populations. This is an exceptional opportunity to contribute to mission-critical problems with world-level impact, directly shaping how the most advanced AI systems are deployed safely and beneficially for all of humanity.
• • In this role, your day-to-day responsibilities will involve tackling complex, often ambiguous problems where rigorous data analysis and interpretation are essential for informing crucial decision-making processes. Depending on your specific background and team alignment, your work could encompass a wide range of critical safety initiatives. You will be instrumental in measuring and quantifying harmful or abusive behaviors across all of OpenAI's products, developing sophisticated detection mechanisms for fraud, manipulation, and coordinated misuse. A significant part of your work will involve evaluating and enhancing the performance of safety classifiers, rule-based systems, mitigation strategies, and human review workflows, ensuring their effectiveness and efficiency. You will also be responsible for designing and executing experiments, including causal analyses, to deeply understand the impact of product changes, policy updates, and implemented mitigation strategies on safety outcomes. Furthermore, you will build and maintain essential analytical tools such as prevalence estimators, comprehensive dashboards, and robust monitoring systems, alongside developing executive decision frameworks that translate complex data into actionable insights for leadership. A key responsibility will be diagnosing and identifying gaps within existing safety and integrity systems by analyzing behavioral and product data, and critically, quantifying and navigating the inherent trade-offs between false positives and false negatives. You will translate abstract safety risks into concrete, measurable problems, providing evidence-based recommendations to guide strategic decisions. Your role will also involve close collaboration and partnership with cross-functional teams, including Product, Engineering, Policy, Research, and Operations, to collectively improve safety outcomes across the organization. A unique aspect of this role is the opportunity to build novel, zero-to-one analytical systems in rapidly evolving and often uncharted domains, requiring innovation and adaptability.
• • You will be joining OpenAI's dedicated Safety teams, a group of world-class professionals committed to the responsible advancement of artificial intelligence. These teams are at the forefront of addressing the most pressing safety and ethical considerations associated with increasingly capable AI systems. The environment is highly collaborative, fostering a culture of shared learning and mutual support as you work alongside researchers, engineers, product managers, and policy experts. OpenAI itself is a pioneering AI research and deployment company with a clear mission: to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company is driven by a profound belief that AI is an immensely powerful tool that must be developed with safety and human needs as its absolute core. This mission necessitates embracing and valuing the diverse perspectives, voices, and experiences that constitute the full spectrum of humanity, making it a truly inclusive and forward-thinking workplace.
• • This role offers unparalleled opportunities for professional growth and impact. You will gain invaluable experience working on mission-critical problems that have a profound and lasting impact on the world, directly contributing to the safe and ethical deployment of frontier AI systems. You will have the unique chance to operate with a high degree of ownership and visibility, influencing key decisions and strategies. The nature of the work involves solving novel problems where established playbooks do not exist, pushing the boundaries of your analytical and problem-solving skills. You will have the opportunity to learn from and collaborate with some of the brightest minds in AI, contributing to a culture of continuous learning and innovation. By joining OpenAI, you will be at the forefront of shaping the future of technology and ensuring that its benefits are widely shared, making a tangible difference in how AI is integrated into society.