Data Scientist, Safety

OpenAI, Inc.

Job Overview

Location

San Francisco

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• Analyze harmful, abusive, or fraudulent behavior across OpenAI’s AI products using behavioral and product data to identify patterns of misuse and misalignment.
• Design and implement prevalence estimators, dashboards, and monitoring systems to track safety risks and measure the effectiveness of mitigation strategies.
• Evaluate and improve safety classifiers, rule-based systems, and human review workflows by quantifying false positive and false negative tradeoffs in real-world deployments.
• Conduct causal analyses and controlled experiments to assess the impact of product changes, policy updates, and safety interventions on user safety outcomes.
• Translate ambiguous, high-stakes safety risks into measurable problems and evidence-based recommendations for product, engineering, and policy teams.
• Build zero-to-one analytical systems in rapidly evolving domains where no existing playbooks or benchmarks are available.
• Partner cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Policy, Research, and Operations teams to embed data-driven safety decision-making into product development cycles.
• Diagnose gaps in integrity and safety systems using large-scale, messy, and incomplete datasets to uncover hidden threats and systemic vulnerabilities.
• Develop executive-level decision frameworks that prioritize safety risks based on prevalence, severity, and potential for harm at scale.
• Collaborate on the design of AI safety interventions by providing data-driven insights that inform model behavior, content moderation, and user protection strategies.
• Own end-to-end analysis initiatives from problem framing through execution and communication of results to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Operate with high autonomy in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment where decisions directly influence the safe deployment of frontier AI systems.
• Contribute to the development of novel metrics and evaluation methodologies for measuring AI safety, alignment, and systemic integrity across global user bases.
• Translate research findings into operational tools that enable proactive detection of coordinated abuse, manipulation, and adversarial behavior.
• Maintain rigorous analytical standards while adapting to evolving threat landscapes and rapidly scaling AI capabilities.
• Communicate complex technical findings clearly and persuasively to leadership, engineers, and policy makers to drive organizational alignment on safety priorities.
• Support the creation of global safety frameworks that account for regional, cultural, and linguistic variations in harmful behavior.
• Work at the intersection of AI research, product safety, and public policy to ensure responsible deployment of increasingly capable AI systems.

🎯 Requirements

• Strong statistical reasoning and analytical judgment
• Experience with experimentation, causal inference, or observational analysis
• Strong SQL and Python skills
• Experience working with messy, incomplete, or noisy datasets
• Ability to structure open-ended business or risk problems
• Excellent communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders

🏖️ Benefits

• Work on mission-critical problems with world-level impact
• Help shape how frontier AI systems are deployed safely
• Operate with unusual ownership and visibility
• Solve novel problems where there are no existing playbooks
• Join highly collaborative teams working across OpenAI

Skills & Technologies

Python

Data Science

Onsite

$230k-325k

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OpenAI, Inc.

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About OpenAI, Inc.

OpenAI is a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research and deployment company founded in 2015. It develops large-scale AI models such as GPT, DALL-E, and Codex, providing cloud APIs and consumer applications like ChatGPT. Originally established as a non-profit, it later created a capped-profit subsidiary to attract capital while maintaining its mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

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