Data Scientist, Safety
At a glance
Mid-level AI Research role at OpenAI. San Francisco · full-time · $265,000–$380,000 base.
aimlroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Use product behavior data to measure harmful activity and spot fraud, manipulation, or coordinated misuse
- Test safety classifiers, rules, mitigations, and human review processes, then identify ways to improve them
- Run experiments and causal analyses to assess how product and policy changes affect safety
- Build prevalence estimates, dashboards, monitoring, and decision tools for safety work
- Turn unclear safety risks into measurable questions and recommendations, working with product, engineering, policy, research, and operations
What you bring
- Strong statistical judgment, with experience in experiments, causal inference, or observational analysis
- Strong SQL and Python skills, plus experience working with noisy or incomplete data
- Ability to shape open-ended business or risk questions and communicate findings to technical and non-technical partners
Who this fits
This role suits a data scientist comfortable working independently on ambiguous problems and building analytical systems from the ground up. The position is based in San Francisco or New York, depending on team alignment and business needs.
From the employer
About the Team
OpenAI’s Safety teams work to ensure our products are safe, trusted, and resilient as frontier AI systems scale globally. We tackle some of the company’s most important challenges across understanding and preventing misuse and misalignment, intercepting fraud and abuse, and protecting vulnerable users.
We are hiring Data Scientists to help build the analytical foundations that allow OpenAI to deploy increasingly capable AI responsibly. We are hiring Data Scientists across several teams that contribute to safety in different ways, including:
Safety Systems
Integrity
Product Policy
This is a high-impact role operating at the intersection of product, safety, policy, and research.
About the Role
As a Data Scientist, Safety, you will help solve complex and ambiguous problems where rigorous analysis directly informs critical decisions.
Depending on your background and team alignment, you may work on areas such as:
Measure harmful or abusive behavior across OpenAI’s products
Detect fraud, manipulation, coordinated misuse
Evaluate and improve safety classifiers, rules systems, mitigation systems, and human review workflows
Design experiments and causal analyses to understand product, policy, and mitigation impacts
Build prevalence estimators, dashboards, monitoring systems, and executive decision frameworks
Diagnose gaps in safety and integrity systems using behavioral and product data, and help quantify and navigate false positive / false negative tradeoffs
Translate ambiguous safety risks into measurable problems and evidence-based recommendations
Partner with Product, Engineering, Policy, Research, and Operations teams to improve safety outcomes
Build zero-to-one analytical systems in rapidly evolving domains
Ideal Candidate
We’re looking for strong Data Scientists who thrive in ambiguous, high-leverage environments.
You may be a fit if you have:
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
High ownership and comfort operating independently
Helpful backgrounds include:
Trust & Safety / Integrity
Fraud & abuse
Security analytics
AI/ML model measurement and evaluation
Alignment and AI safety research
Biosecurity, synthetic biology, infectious diseases, or computational biology
Why This Role
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
Location
San Francisco or New York depending on team alignment and business need.
Compensation Range: $230K - $325K USD
About OpenAI
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. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
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