Device Safety & Risk Operations Specialist, User Safety & Risk Operations

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 252,000 - 335,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Hybrid work model

Job summary

OpenAI is looking for a Device Safety & Risk Operations Specialist in San Francisco to develop a safety operating model for new consumer hardware. The role involves defining incident protocols, managing high-severity risks, and collaborating across multiple teams.

The ideal candidate has 8+ years of experience in device safety or related fields. The position offers a competitive salary between $252,000 and $335,000 plus equity and a hybrid working model.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in device safety, product safety, or operations.
• Experience building safety programs from ambiguous requirements.
• Ability to handle high-severity incidents and sensitive information.

Responsibilities

• Build end-to-end safety operating models for new consumer hardware.
• Define incident taxonomies and escalation criteria.
• Develop operational playbooks for product-safety incidents.

Skills

Device safety

Risk program management

Technical program management

Data analysis

Incident management

Education

8+ years of relevant experience

Job description

Device Safety & Risk Operations Specialist, User Safety & Risk Operations

Trust & Safety – San Francisco

About the Team

At OpenAI, our User Safety & Risk Operations (USRO) team helps protect our products and users from abuse, fraud, safety risks, and other forms of misuse. We operate at the front line of real‑world safety and risk management, translating user and operational signals into timely decisions, effective interventions, and improvements to our systems.

About the Role

We are seeking a Device Safety & Risk Operations Specialist to build the safety operating model for a new category of consumer hardware. This senior individual‑contributor role requires turning emerging product risks and incomplete requirements into practical workflows, controls, launch plans, and durable systems.

In this role you will:

• Build the end‑to‑end safety and risk operating model for new consumer hardware, from early requirements through launch and early‑life operations.
• Define incident taxonomies, severity levels, decision rights, escalation criteria, response pathways, and closure standards.
• Develop operational playbooks for product‑safety incidents, critical escalations, safety advisories, corrective actions, and other high‑risk events.
• Design workflows for regulated and privacy‑sensitive cases, including restricted handling, evidence requirements, auditability, and partner escalation.
• Translate safety and operational needs into requirements for tooling, case management, data access, monitoring, logging, and automation.
• Establish clear ownership boundaries across Product, Engineering, Legal, Privacy, Product Policy, Support, Product Quality, and other operational partners.
• Build launch‑readiness plans, tabletop exercises, training, quality controls, reporting, and post‑launch monitoring.
• Use operational data, customer signals, product telemetry, and case outcomes to identify patterns and improve upstream products and systems.
• Determine where AI and automation can improve triage, evidence assembly, consistency, and response while preserving appropriate human judgment.
• Stand up priority workflows, operate them through launch and early‑life stabilization, and transition them into durable homes across USRO and partner teams.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 8+ years of relevant experience in device safety, product safety, consumer hardware operations, technical program management, or a related field.
• Have built a complex safety or risk program from an ambiguous starting point through launch and scaled operation.
• Understand the realities of handling high‑severity incidents, regulated workflows, sensitive customer information, and time‑critical escalations.
• Can translate product, engineering, legal, privacy, and policy constraints into workflows that operational teams can execute.
• Are technically fluent and can reason through data flows, telemetry, access controls, audit logs, case systems, automation, and failure modes.
• Use data to assess workflow health, identify emerging patterns, evaluate quality, and make risk‑based decisions.
• Can establish clear accountability across teams with overlapping responsibilities and different risk tolerances.
• Know how to balance launch speed with safety controls, monitoring, rollback criteria, and longer‑term system development.
• Communicate clearly with operational, technical, legal, and executive audiences when evidence is incomplete or trade‑offs are difficult.
• Are highly practical and willing to build the workflow, not only define the strategy.

Nice to have:

• Experience supporting consumer hardware, connected devices, or other products used in shared environments.
• Experience with product‑safety investigations, recalls, field failures, safety advisories, or hazardous‑product handling.
• Experience designing workflows involving privacy‑sensitive sensor, diagnostic, media, or household data.
• Familiarity with warranty, repair, reverse logistics, identity recovery, fraud, or ownership disputes.
• Experience building vendor training, quality‑assurance, incident‑response, or specialist‑review programs.

Location / work model: San Francisco, CA; hybrid, 3 days/week in‑office.

Please note: This role may involve exposure to sensitive or concerning material. Strong discretion, judgment, and resilience are essential.

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.

OpenAI’s affirmative‑action and equal‑employment‑opportunity policy statement is available upon request.

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 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.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via a provided link.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy.

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared.

Compensation

$252,000 – $335,000 plus equity.