Technical Abuse Investigator

About The Team

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. 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. This role combines traditional investigative judgment with strong technical fluency, involving navigation of complex datasets to surface actionable abuse signals. You will also act as a force multiplier for the broader investigations team by scaling or automating highly manual processes, designing and implementing lightweight technical solutions like notebook templates, data pipelines, or internal utilities to enable investigators to operate more efficiently. Success is measured by investigations completed and by the effectiveness of your work in enhancing team efficiency and consistency.

You will collaborate closely with engineering, legal, investigations, security, and policy partners to respond to time-sensitive escalations, investigate activity outside existing safeguards, and translate insights into scalable detection and enforcement strategies. This role includes participation in an on-call rotation for urgent escalations and may involve sensitive content. This role will work PST and is open to remote work within the United States, with a heavy preference for candidates based in San Francisco or New York.

In This Role, You Will

• Detect, investigate, and disrupt abuse and harm using complex datasets, collaborating with policy, legal, global affairs, security, and engineering teams.
• Develop and iterate on abuse signals and investigative methods, scaling 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.
• Develop a deep understanding of OpenAI’s products, data systems, and enforcement mechanisms, collaborating with engineering and data teams.
• Communicate investigation findings effectively through written briefs, data-backed recommendations, and escalation summaries.
• Rotate (infrequently) into an incident response role requiring rapid threat triaging, investigation, mitigation, sound judgment, and concise briefing to senior leadership.
• Be someone people enjoy working with and demonstrate proven ability to quickly learn new processes, systems, and team dynamics 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.
• Are a 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 AI system capabilities and safely deploy them through our products. AI must be created with safety and human needs at its core, valuing diverse perspectives to achieve our mission.

Key skills/competency

• Abuse Investigation
• Data Analysis
• Threat Detection
• SQL & Python
• Incident Response
• Platform Safety
• Technical Solutions
• Policy Enforcement
• Machine Learning
• AI Misuse