Head of Preparedness

ABOUT THE TEAM

The Safety Systems team ensures that OpenAI’s most capable models can be responsibly developed and deployed. We build evaluations, safeguards, and safety frameworks that help our models behave as intended in real-world settings.

OpenAI has invested deeply in Preparedness https://openai.com/index/updating-our-preparedness-framework/ across multiple generations of frontier models, building core capability evaluations, threat models, and cross-functional mitigations. As we expect model capabilities to continue to increase and we continue implementing increasingly complex safeguards, this work remains a major priority. The Head of Preparedness will expand, strengthen, and guide this program so our safety standards scale with the capabilities of the systems we develop.

ABOUT THE ROLE

As the Head of Preparedness, you will lead the technical strategy and execution of OpenAI’s Preparedness framework https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/18a02b5d-6b67-4cec-ab64-68cdfbddebcd/preparedness-framework-v2.pdf, our framework explaining OpenAI’s approach to tracking and preparing for frontier capabilities that create new risks of severe harm. You will be the directly responsible leader for building and coordinating capability evaluations, threat models, and mitigations that form a coherent, rigorous, and operationally scalable safety pipeline.

This role requires deep technical judgment, clear communication, and the ability to guide complex work across multiple risk domains. You will lead a small, high-impact team to drive core Preparedness research, while partnering broadly across Safety Systems and OpenAI for end-to-end adoption and execution of the framework.

IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL:

- Own OpenAI’s preparedness strategy end-to-end by building capability evaluations, establishing threat models, and building and coordinating mitigations.

- Lead the development of frontier capability evaluations, ensuring they are precise, robust, and scalable across rapid product cycles.

- Oversee mitigation design across major risk areas (e.g., cyber, bio), ensuring safeguards are technically sound, effective, and aligned with underlying threat models.

- Guide interpretation of evaluation results and ensure they directly inform launch decisions, policy choices, and safety cases.

- Refine and evolve the preparedness framework as new risks, capabilities, or external expectations emerge.

- Collaborate cross-functionally with research, engineering, product teams, policy monitoring and enforcement teams, governance, and external partners to integrate preparedness into real-world deployment.

YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU:

- Are motivated by ensuring frontier AI systems are safe, reliable, and responsibly deployed.

- Bring deep technical expertise in machine learning, AI safety, evaluations, security, or adjacent risk domains.

- Have experience designing or executing high-rigor evaluations for complex technical systems.

- Are comfortable making clear, high-stakes technical judgments under uncertainty.

- Communicate crisply and can align diverse stakeholders around safety decisions.

- Have managed or led technical teams, or driven cross-functional initiatives in research-intensive environments.

- Excel at balancing scientific depth with operational realities—shipping high-quality work on tight timelines in fast-moving contexts.

- (Nice to have) Bring experience in areas such as threat modeling, cybersecurity, biosecurity, misalignment/deception, or other frontier-risk domains.

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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.

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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