Engineering Manager: Frontier AI Safety Systems

OpenAI, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 350,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Hybrid work model

Job summary

OpenAI’s Preparedness Engineering team seeks an engineering manager to lead a team building software systems that detect and prevent harmful misuse of frontier AI models, with emphasis on reliability and scale. The role blends software engineering leadership with security and risk management, operating at billions of user scale.

The position is based in San Francisco, CA, with a hybrid model requiring 3 days in the office weekly and relocation assistance for new employees.

Qualifications

• Significant experience leading engineering teams and delivering production systems end-to-end.
• Strong technical judgment in system design, distributed systems, data pipelines, observability, and operational reliability.
• Demonstrated ability to partner cross-functionally with Research/Product/Security to ship systems that materially reduce risk or abuse at scale.
• Background in autonomy, high-scale real-time systems, or intelligence-adjacent technical domains is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of software engineers building detection + mitigation systems for frontier model harms.
• Set the technical roadmap and execution strategy: prioritize, design, ship, iterate, measure impact.
• Build production systems: services, pipelines, tooling, instrumentation, and automation that scale with frontier model usage.
• Partner deeply with Research and Product to translate evolving model capabilities into concrete tests, signals, and mitigations that can be deployed at scale.
• Drive strong engineering fundamentals: architecture, reliability, monitoring, performance, and operational excellence.
• Hire and grow an exceptional team across backend, data systems, and applied ML engineering domains as needed.
• Anticipate what breaks at scale as agentic workflows become more capable.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Production systems

System design

Distributed systems

Data pipelines

Observability

Operational reliability

Cross-functional collaboration

Autonomy/real-time systems

Job description

OpenAI’s Preparedness Engineering team seeks an engineering manager to lead a team building software systems that detect and prevent harmful misuse of frontier AI models, with emphasis on reliability and scale. The role blends software engineering leadership with security and risk management, operating at billions of user scale.

The position is based in San Francisco, CA, with a hybrid model requiring 3 days in the office weekly and relocation assistance for new employees.