Engineering Manager, Guardian

Openai; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI in London is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the Guardian team, owning the engineering strategy and execution for production systems that evaluate agent behavior, identify risk, and take action with minimal user friction.

This builder-manager role blends technical depth with people leadership, setting direction, developing engineers, and shaping the operating cadence while contributing to architecture, reviews, and hands-on coding when it yields the greatest impact.

Qualifications

• Experience leading engineering teams that shipped complex, high-stakes production systems end to end.
• Experience with AI agents or large language models in a core product, startup, or technically serious independent project.
• Ability to balance safety, usability, speed, and reliability.

Responsibilities

• Lead, hire, and grow a London-based team of engineers working across agent safety, backend systems, applied AI, and product infrastructure.
• Set the technical roadmap for Guardian platform, balancing safety, product utility, latency, and operational reliability.
• Build production systems that evaluate agent actions in real time, detect potentially harmful behavior, and support safe recovery or escalation paths.
• Improve how oversight systems understand user intent, environmental context, permissions, and relevant personalization signals while protecting privacy and avoiding friction.
• Partner closely with alignment researchers to turn prototypes and monitoring techniques into scalable product capabilities.

Skills

Leadership

Team management

Production systems

AI safety

Job description

About the Team

The Guardian team builds practical safety and oversight systems for increasingly capable AI agents. Our goal is to make it possible for agents to take on longer-running, higher-autonomy work while preserving meaningful safeguards, respecting user intent, and intervening when actions could cause serious or difficult-to-reverse harm.

Auto-review is an early example of this work. When an agent reaches a permission boundary, a separate model evaluates the proposed action in context and determines whether it should proceed. The team is now extending this foundation into more capable oversight systems that account for richer user context, support a broader range of agent experiences, and integrate across OpenAI products.

Guardian sits at the intersection of engineering, alignment research, product, infrastructure, and security. The team already has a strong engineering foundation in London and will continue to grow there as a concentrated, highly collaborative group.

About the Role

We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead and grow the Guardian team in London. You will own the engineering strategy and execution for production systems that evaluate agent behavior, identify risk, and take appropriate action without creating unnecessary friction for users.

This is a builder-manager role with substantial technical depth. You will set direction, develop engineers, and create the operating cadence for a high-performing team, while remaining close enough to the work to shape architecture, review designs, debug difficult problems, and write code when it is the highest-leverage way to help the team move forward.

The role is highly visible and cross-functional. You will work closely with alignment researchers to translate emerging research into dependable systems, and with product teams to make agent safety a foundational capability across OpenAI.

This role is based in our London office.

In this role, you will

• Lead, hire, and develop a London-based team of engineers working across agent safety, backend systems, applied AI, and product infrastructure.
• Set the technical roadmap for Auto-review and the broader Guardian platform, balancing safety, product utility, latency, and operational reliability.
• Build production systems that evaluate agent actions in real time, detect potentially harmful behavior, and support safe recovery or escalation paths.
• Improve how oversight systems understand user intent, environmental context, permissions, and relevant personalization signals while protecting privacy and avoiding unnecessary friction.
• Partner closely with alignment researchers to turn prototypes, evaluations, and new monitoring techniques into scalable product capabilities.
• Work across Product, Security, Infrastructure, and other engineering teams to integrate Guardian capabilities into agent experiences throughout OpenAI.
• Establish rigorous evaluation and operational practices, including adversarial testing, failure analysis, monitoring, and metrics for safety performance, false positives, latency, and user impact.

You might thrive in this role if you

• Have significant experience leading engineering teams that shipped complex, high-stakes production systems end to end.
• Have built with AI agents or large language models in a core product, startup, or technically serious independent project, and understand the unique challenges of agentic systems.
• Bring strong product-engineering judgment and can navigate tradeoffs across safety, usability, speed, and reliability.
• Can partner effectively with research teams, translate open-ended findings into engineering plans, and communicate clearly across technical disciplines.
• Have a thoughtful management system for hiring, coaching, performance, and execution.
• Care deeply about building AI systems that are useful, trustworthy, and safe.

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 Aff.

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.