Data Scientist, Safety

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 appl…