Head of Trust & Safety Affairs

About the Team

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. Achieving this mission requires not only cutting-edge research, but also thoughtful engagement with the policymakers, institutions, and communities shaping the future of AI—and clear, credible communication with the public.

The Global Affairs team leads this engagement in close partnership with teams across OpenAI. We work to ensure that diverse external perspectives inform our decisions, and that OpenAI’s approach to safety, governance, and responsibility is understood by those who rely on, regulate, and are affected by our technologies. Through this work, we help advance effective regulation, responsible industry standards, and governance frameworks that support the safe and beneficial development of AI.

This role will be based out of San Francisco or Remote

About the Role

OpenAI is seeking a Head of Trust & Safety Affairs to lead strategic narrative development and key stakeholder engagement on the issues most central to public trust in AI. This is a high-impact leadership role at the intersection of product, policy, communications, legal, security, and research.

You will oversee policy, partnership and outreach related to trust and safety topics including privacy, data security, child safety, mental health, elections, and other emerging issues. The role requires translating complex technical and policy work into clear, accurate, and credible narratives for global audiences, while advising senior leaders and guiding internal alignment during both proactive moments and fast-moving situations.

This role reports to the Vice President for Global Policy.

Responsibilities

Strategy and leadership

• Set the stakeholder outreach and engagement strategy for trust and safety topics, aligning narratives across product, policy, legal, security, research, and communications.

• Serve as a senior advisor to executives and cross-functional leaders on trust, safety, and integrity narratives, balancing transparency, accountability, and operational considerations.

• Build and lead a high-performing team and/or agency partners capable of proactive communications, issues management, and rapid response.

Portfolio ownership

• Develop narrative pillars, proof points, and content roadmaps across trust and safety issue areas.

• Partner closely with Privacy, Security, and Safety teams to communicate user protections, controls, and governance mechanisms in ways that are accurate, usable, and trustworthy.

• Shape OpenAI’s external approach to sensitive and high-stakes topics, including child and youth safety, mental health-related safeguards, and election integrity commitments.

Proactive outreach and thought leadership

• Lead external outreach and narrative development for product updates, policy positions, safety improvements, research releases, and transparency initiatives related to trust and safety.

• Contribute to the development of executive talking points, blogs and op-eds, Q&As, briefing materials, and communications for partners, NGOs, government, and industry.

• Identify opportunities to set the public agenda by clearly explaining safety mitigations, red-teaming insights, enforcement approaches, and evolving industry standards.

Issues management and rapid response

• Own preparedness and response for trust and safety issues, including incident communications planning, escalation protocols, stakeholder notifications, and media strategy.

• Lead cross-functional communications during high-intensity moments, ensuring clarity, consistency, speed, and calm execution.

• Anticipate emerging risk narratives, misinformation trends, and stakeholder concerns, and build monitoring systems and response playbooks.

Internal alignment and operating rhythms

• Establish systems to maintain internal alignment, including narrative and message discipline, approval workflows, decision-making processes, and single-source-of-truth documentation.

• Coordinate trust-focused readiness for launches and major moments through scenario planning, media training, and stakeholder briefings.

• Partner with regional and global teams to ensure communications are coherent across markets and regulatory environments.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of progressive experience in communications and policy, with significant work in issues management, trust and safety, public policy, privacy/security, or related fields—ideally in high-scrutiny technology environments.

• Demonstrated experience leading communications on complex, technical, and sensitive topics such as privacy, security, integrity, child safety, mental health, elections, or adjacent areas.

• Proven ability to operate as a senior advisor to executives, with strong judgment, discretion, and influence across cross-functional stakeholders.

• Strong people leadership experience, including building and managing teams, mentoring senior individual contributors, and partnering effectively with agencies.

• Deep fluency in modern communications, including media strategy, stakeholder engagement, narrative development, crisis response, and executive communications.

• Ability to synthesize technical and policy detail into clear, accurate language without over-promising, and comfort navigating uncertainty and evolving information.

• Excellent writing and editing skills, with the ability to deliver high-quality work under tight timelines.

• Collaborative, builder-oriented mindset with experience creating scalable processes, playbooks, and operating rhythms.

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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