Frontier AI Safety Policy Designer

Neura Market; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI seeks a Policy-focused engineer to shape model behavior in high-risk contexts. You will design and maintain policies across safety domains, translate risk into behavioral specifications, and develop scalable safeguards for deployment.

You’ll collaborate with research, engineering, product, and operations to turn risk insights into measurable policy. This role is based in San Francisco with a hybrid schedule and relocation support.

Qualifications

• Experience building or applying policies, taxonomies, harm models, threat models, or risk frameworks for complex technical or societal systems.
• Ability to translate risk and harm models into behavioral specifications and evaluation criteria.
• Ability to work across research, engineering, product, and policy teams to operationalize policy.
• Comfort using empirical evidence, including evaluations and deployment observations, to inform policy decisions.
• Strong written and verbal communication about complex safety tradeoffs.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain model policies across safety-relevant domains, including dual-use, agentic, and emerging frontier-risk areas.
• Translate risk and harm models into clear behavioral specifications, evaluation criteria, grading guidance, and system-level safeguards.
• Define practical boundaries between beneficial uses of AI and assistance that could materially enable harm, exploitation, misuse, or unsafe outcomes.
• Build policy artifacts that support model training, evaluation, and deployment. Partner with safety researchers, engineers, product teams, and other stakeholders to operationalize policy into scalable model behavior and measurable safeguards.
• Use red-teaming results, deployment data, model failures, over-refusals, under-refusals, and ambiguous edge cases to improve policy and evaluation quality over time.
• Identify emerging capability areas where frontier AI systems could create new safety challenges or lower barriers to harm.
• Study real-world deployments to identify where model behavior succeeds, fails, or drifts from the intended safety posture.
• Combine longer-horizon safety research with hands-on launch and deployment work.
• Contribute to system cards, safety reports, policy documentation, launch reviews, and external communications on OpenAI's approach to model safety and risk mitigation.
• Design and run human data campaigns, including gold set construction, labeling guidance, calibration, adjudication, and eval coverage analysis, to ensure policies can be reliably measured and improved.

Skills

Policy development

Risk modeling

Red-teaming

Cross-functional collaboration

Evaluation methods

System design thinking

Job description

OpenAI seeks a Policy-focused engineer to shape model behavior in high-risk contexts. You will design and maintain policies across safety domains, translate risk into behavioral specifications, and develop scalable safeguards for deployment.

You’ll collaborate with research, engineering, product, and operations to turn risk insights into measurable policy. This role is based in San Francisco with a hybrid schedule and relocation support.