Technical Abuse Investigator

About the Team

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We believe achieving this goal requires real-world deployment and continuous iteration based on how our products are used—and misused—in practice.

The Intelligence and Investigations team supports this mission by detecting, investigating, and disrupting the misuse of our products, particularly critical or novel harms. Our work enables partner teams to develop data-backed model policies and build scalable safety mitigations. By precisely understanding abuse, we help ensure OpenAI’s products can be used safely to build meaningful, rewarding applications.

About the Role

As a Technical Abuse Investigator on the Intelligence and Investigations team, you will be responsible for detecting, investigating, and disrupting malicious use of OpenAI’s platform. You will further scale parts of the investigative process to help our team disrupt harm at scale. This role combines traditional investigative judgment with strong technical fluency: much of the work involves navigating complex datasets to surface actionable abuse signals, not just reviewing individual reports.

In addition to conducting investigations directly, this role is explicitly designed to act as a force multiplier for the broader investigations team. You will be scaling or automating highly manual, important and nuanced processes. You will design and implement lightweight technical solutions—such as notebook templates, data pipelines or internal utilities—that enable specialized investigators to identify, track, and action abuse at a greater scale than a single investigator can currently achieve. Success in this role is measured not only by investigations completed, but by how effectively your work enables you and your team members to operate more efficiently and consistently.

You will work closely with engineering, legal, investigations, security, and policy partners to respond to time-sensitive escalations, investigate activity that falls outside existing safeguards, and translate investigative insights into scalable detection and enforcement strategies.

This role includes participation in an on-call rotation to handle urgent escalations outside of normal work hours. Some investigations may involve sensitive content, including sexual, violent, or otherwise disturbing material. This role will work PST and is open to remote work within the United States, though we heavily prefer candidates based in San Francisco or New York.

In this role, you will:

• Detect, investigate and disrupt abuse and harm with policy, legal, global affairs, security, and engineering teams via complex datasets.

• Develop and iterate on abuse signals and investigative methods, scaling one-off insights to reduce manual effort and expand coverage.

• Build and maintain lightweight technical solutions (e.g., SQL/ Python data pipelines, investigation templates, dashboards, or internal utilities) for investigators focused on specific harm domains.

• Develop a deep understanding of OpenAI’s products, data systems, and enforcement mechanisms, and collaborate with engineering and data teams to improve investigative tooling, data quality, and workflows.

• Communicate investigation findings effectively to internal stakeholders through written briefs, data-backed recommendations, and escalation summaries

• Rotate (in-frequently) into an incident response role that requires rapid threat triaging, investigation, mitigation, sound judgement and concise briefing to senior leadership.

• Be someone people enjoy working with.

• Proven ability to quickly learn new processes, systems and team dynamics while thriving in ambiguous, rapidly changing, and high-pressure environments.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have deep expertise in at least two of the following domains: agentic AI misuse; automation; encryption; terrorism; fraud; violence; child exploitation; data science; dashboarding; api abuse; product exploits, prompt injection; distillation.

• Have 5+ years of experience investigating and mitigating abuse in a relevant domain.

• Have 2+ years of relevant technical projects.

• Strong presenter on safety work in public or policy settings.

• Have experience scaling or automating processes, especially with LLMs or ML techniques.

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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