Manager, Protection Scientist Engineer

About The Team

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We believe that achieving our goal requires real world deployment and iteratively updating based on what we learn.

The Intelligence and Investigations team supports this by identifying and investigating misuses of our products – especially new types of abuse. This enables our partner teams to develop data-backed product policies and build scaled safety mitigations. Precisely understanding abuse allows us to safely enable users to build useful things with our products.

About The Role

Protection Science Engineering is an interdisciplinary role mixing data science, machine learning, investigation, and policy/protocol development. As a Manager, Protection Scientist Engineer, you will lead a small but growing team of PSEs who design and build systems to proactively identify and enforce on abuse on OpenAI’s products. This includes ensuring we have robust abuse monitoring in place for new products, sustaining monitoring for existing products, and prototyping and incubating systems of defense against our highest risk harms. The team also responds to and investigates critical escalations, especially those that are not caught by our existing safety systems. The team, and you, will leverage expert understanding of our products and data, and work cross-functionally with product, policy, and scaled engineering teams.

This role is based in our San Francisco office and may involve resolving urgent escalations outside of normal work hours. Some investigations and work may involve sensitive content, including sexual, child safety, violent, or otherwise-disturbing material.

In This Role, You Will

• Lead, manage, and support an interdisciplinary and technical team across US timezones, working with them to chart longer term strategies.
• Leverage your expertise in designing, launching, and improving systems of defense to mentor the team and develop both technical and organisational solutions.
• Identify and create opportunities to enhance and make more efficient the team’s core work through understanding both cross-functional and technical challenges.
• Review, and at times design and participate in, the implementation of abuse detection, review, and enforcement for new product launches and major harms.
• Work with Product, Policy, Ops, and Investigative teams to understand key risks and how to address them, and with Engineering teams to ensure we have sufficient data and scaled tooling.
• Communicate the work of the team, at times externally, and coordinate with cross-functional partners to scope and prioritize work across abuse response.

You Might Thrive In This Role If You

• Have at least two years of experience managing or tech leading teams that fight threats at a tech company and/or government organization.
• Have deep experience with technical analysis and harm detection, especially using SQL and Python.
• Have experience in trust and safety and/or have worked closely with policy, enforcement, and engineering teams. An investigative mindset is key.
• Have experience with basic data engineering, such as building core tables or writing data pipelines in production, and with machine learning principles and execution. Basic software development skills are a plus as this role writes productionised code.
• Have experience scaling and automating processes, especially with language models.

Key skills/competency

• Data Science
• Machine Learning
• Threat Investigation
• Trust & Safety
• Policy Development
• SQL
• Python
• Data Engineering
• Abuse Detection
• System Design