Data Scientist, Safety Systems

About the Team

The Safety Systems team is dedicated to ensuring the safety, robustness, and reliability of AI models and their deployment in the real world.

Building on the many years of our practical alignment work and applied safety efforts, Safety Systems addresses emerging safety issues and develops new fundamental solutions to enable the safe deployment of our most advanced models and future AGI, to make AI that is beneficial and trustworthy.

Learn more about OpenAI’s approach to safety

About the Role

As a Data Scientist in Safety Systems, you will establish the data-driven approach for understanding, evaluating, and monitoring the safety of our production systems. You should expect to collaborate with our partners across the company to define north-star metrics, own and implement the statistical methods to productionize those metrics, conduct analysis to understand the impact of our products, and establish source-of-truth dashboards that the entire company can use to answer safety-related questions. Most importantly, you will be a core member of the Safety Systems team, collaborating with researchers and engineers to advance our goals of safe, robust, and reliable AI.

This role is based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Lead our efforts in understanding and measuring the real-world safety impacts of OpenAI’s current and upcoming products

• Uncovering new ways to improve our approaches to measuring and mitigating harm and abuse

• Develop and implement statistical methods necessary to operationalize safety-related metrics

• Provide direction, guidance, and coordination of projects in the space

• Establish a data-driven culture within Safety Systems by driving the definition, tracking, and operationalizing of feature-, product-, and company-level metrics

• Create and disseminate dashboards, reports, and tools that enable the team and company to answer safety-related questions independently

• Develop safety data flywheel and provide safety research with production insights/data for training and evaluation.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 5+ years experience in a quantitative role navigating highly ambiguous environments, ideally as a founding data scientist or team lead at a hyper-growth product company or research org

• Proven leadership skills, including leading multiple data scientists and cross-functional teams

• Expertise in defining and implementing metrics, with a track record of operationalizing new feature and product-level metrics from scratch

• Excellent communication skills with demonstrated ability to communicate with product managers, engineers, and executives alike

• Strategic insights that extend beyond traditional statistical significance testing.

You could be an especially great fit if you have:

• Experience in trust and safety, integrity, anti-abuse, or related fields

• Demonstrated prior experience in NLP, large language models, or generative AI

• Strong statistical background, including knowledge of sampling, regression, causal analysis, and more

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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