Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Safety has become a core operating function for SaaS businesses that ship AI capabilities into production, and this Program Manager role sits directly in that reality. The remit spans model and product releases, where launch decisions are increasingly shaped by evaluation, monitoring, and governance rather than feature readiness alone. In the SaaS ecosystem, roles like this signal a shift toward treating risk management as part of the product lifecycle, not a separate compliance track.
From a career standpoint, the position offers a view into how modern SaaS organizations build repeatable processes around high-stakes launches. Coordinating inputs across research, engineering, product, legal, and policy mirrors the cross-functional complexity found in many scaling SaaS environments, especially those operating with platform-style products. Experience translating post-launch learnings into better tooling and safeguards is also broadly transferable to reliability, trust and safety, and operational excellence paths across SaaS.
This role tends to fit professionals who enjoy creating structure where work is ambiguous and stakeholder-heavy. It will suit someone comfortable working close to technical teams while maintaining clear program artifacts, decision points, and follow-through. It is also a strong match for candidates motivated by the practical mechanics of responsible deployment, not just strategy or documentation.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the Team
The Safety Systems team works to ensure OpenAI's most capable models can be developed and deployed responsibly. Our work spans evaluations, safeguards, red teaming, deployment decisions, and the systems that help OpenAI understand and reduce risk as models become more capable and widely used. Safety Systems is in need of a Safety Program Manager to streamline our safety review process. This role is critical for driving safe deployment of our new models and products, synthesizing inputs from multiple stakeholders — across research, product, engineering, legal, and policy — and ensuring all the risks are effectively and properly monitored, mitigated, or resolved.
About the Role
As a Safety Program Manager, you will be responsible for critical tasks ranging from tracking safety reviews and risk tables as part of OpenAI’s launch processes to acting as the connective tissue to enhance the deployment of our safety systems. This role is incredibly cross functional, working with stakeholders across our research, engineering, integrity, product, and strategy teams to ensure our launches have been thoroughly reviewed for safety risks.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role, you will:
Coordinate cross-functional safety launch readiness across model and product releases, ensuring risk tables, mitigations, monitoring plans, and decision points are clearly tracked from early scoping through post-launch review.
Build operating rhythms across Safety Systems, Integrity, Strategy, User Operations, and engineering teams so safety learnings from past launches translate into concrete improvements to automated safeguards, tooling, and review processes.
Design and run key internal programs, including incident management and processes for regularly updating our safety mitigations.
Work directly with technical stakeholders to create scalable, repeatable safety processes.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Graduate degree in computer science, engineering, management or equivalent experience.
Have an extensive track record of successfully delivering high-profile, complex projects against tight deadlines.
Are technically versed, and have effectively partnered with engineering and fundamental research teams of the highest caliber.
Have expertise in designing and implementing simple, scalable processes that solve complex problems.
Are relentlessly resourceful and thrive in ambiguous, fast-paced environments.
Have strong knowledge of content integrity and moderation, including industry best practices and regulatory guidelines.
Have exceptional written and verbal communication skills.
Care about AGI safety.
Compensation Range: $162K - $240K USD
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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