Technical Program Manager, AI Safety & Safeguards

Technical Program Management - San Francisco

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About the Team

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Safely delivering increasingly capable AI systems requires scalable technical safeguards, clear ownership of emerging risks, rigorous deployment readiness, and close coordination across research, engineering, product, operations, legal, policy, and external partners.

Our Technical Program Managers lead complex, high-stakes initiatives that turn safety commitments into deployed systems and measurable outcomes. We work across model development, infrastructure, product, and operational response to help ensure our technology is deployed responsibly and cannot be used to cause serious real-world harm.

About the Role

We’re seeking Technical Program Managers to drive complex product, platform, and safety initiatives across ChatGPT, API, enterprise, and related deployment environments. These roles operate at the intersection of technical strategy and execution: you will turn safety and product priorities into actionable plans, influence architectural and operational decisions, and deliver durable capabilities across model, infrastructure, application, and platform layers.

Depending on the role, you may enable sensitive or high-impact model deployments, integrate safeguards into cloud and API platforms, prevent violent misuse and other serious harms, improve detection and enforcement systems, create platform solutions for safety or establish new programs as risks evolve. You will partner deeply with engineers, researchers, product managers, and operational teams while communicating technical tradeoffs and program decisions to senior leadership.

You bring technical fluency, product judgment, and a strong execution record. You’re comfortable navigating ambiguity, advocating for users and developers, balancing safety with model usefulness, and leading cross-functional work with urgency, rigor, and empathy. Specific focus areas and scope will vary by opening and level.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

Partner with product, engineering, research, and design to shape technical roadmaps, long-term platform direction, and safeguards priorities across ChatGPT, API, enterprise, and cloud environments.
Translate product and safety objectives into execution plans that balance near-term delivery, long-term platform evolution, customer needs, and responsible deployment.
Lead cross-functional programs end to end—from problem definition and technical design through implementation, launch, iteration, and operational follow-through.
Own milestones, dependencies, risk mitigation, decision-making, and accountability across engineering, infrastructure, integrity, trust and safety, legal, policy, operations, and go-to-market teams.
Partner with engineers on system architecture, public and internal APIs, cloud deployment patterns, platform integrations, operational failure modes, and technical tradeoffs.
Drive the development, integration, or rollout of safeguards such as model evaluations, post-training mitigations, classifiers, abuse detection, monitoring, enforcement workflows, human review, and agent-assisted review.
Coordinate readiness for sensitive or high-impact deployments, ensuring appropriate safety coverage, escalation paths, operational controls, and alignment with external cloud or enterprise partners.
Identify emerging misuse and severe-harm risks; define ownership and response mechanisms across prevention, detection, investigation, enforcement, and continuous improvement.
Establish meaningful metrics for program delivery, deployment readiness, safety effectiveness, operational quality, and user or developer experience.
Represent customer and developer needs in technical and leadership decisions, balancing risk reduction, model usefulness, implementation complexity, speed, and scale.
Communicate program health, risks, recommendations, and consequential tradeoffs clearly to engineering teams, cross-functional partners, and executives.
Improve delivery and safety outcomes through practical operating mechanisms, scalable tooling, and data- or AI-assisted workflows.

You might thrive in this role if you:

Have a strong track record of delivering high-impact technical programs across product, platform, API, infrastructure, machine learning, or safety domains.
Bring strong technical judgment across distributed systems, cloud deployments, public or internal APIs, developer platforms, production machine learning, or scalable product architecture.
Can engage credibly with engineers on system design, implementation tradeoffs, reliability, deployment constraints, and operational risks.
Have delivered platforms or developer-facing capabilities and understand how technical decisions affect customer experience, developer experience, and product usefulness.
Understand how safety, integrity, or abuse-prevention systems work, including evaluations, model guardrails, classifiers, monitoring, enforcement, investigations, and incident response.
Bring strong program management discipline and can coordinate multiple workstreams, resolve complex dependencies, and turn ambiguity into accountable execution.
Demonstrate product judgment and can balance user and customer needs with model usefulness, safety risk, technical complexity, and business priorities.
Communicate clearly and empathetically with engineering teams, executives, policy and legal partners, and external stakeholders.
Are comfortable owning high-stakes programs that require executive presence, cross-organizational influence, and sound decisions under uncertainty.
Have relevant experience with sensitive deployments, major cloud providers, or serious-harm domains such as violent misuse, child safety, cybersecurity, or other emerging threats.
Are hands-on, curious, and motivated to help ensure increasingly capable AI systems are deployed responsibly.

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 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 US-based candidates. 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.

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

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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

Compensation

$257K – $445K + Offers Equity

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