Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Abuse Investigator role is featured because it sits at a critical intersection of SaaS platform operations and trust and safety. OpenAI’s products are deployed at real scale, and the listing makes clear that misuse evolves alongside adoption, creating a continuous need for investigation, disruption, and feedback into product policy and mitigations. In SaaS terms, this is work that directly influences how a widely used platform can be safely offered to diverse customer and developer use cases.
From a SaaS career perspective, the role builds durable expertise in turning ambiguous, high-signal operational data into decisions that shape product safeguards. The remit spans incident response, developing detection signals, and improving workflows, which maps closely to how mature SaaS companies operationalise risk management across product, policy, and legal functions. Experience communicating findings to stakeholders also translates well to integrity, risk, and operational leadership paths in platform businesses.
This position tends to suit professionals who prefer investigative, evidence-driven work and can maintain judgement under time-sensitive escalation conditions. It is a strong match for those motivated by adversarial problem spaces and cross-functional collaboration, especially where technical fluency and structured casework need to coexist with clear briefing and process improvement.
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
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
As an Abuse Investigator on the Intelligence and Investigations team, you will be responsible for detecting and/or reviewing malicious uses and activities of our platform and disrupting actors that abuse our policies and other harmful behavior. This will require expert understanding of our products and data and experience investigating threat actors. You will also respond to time sensitive escalations, especially those that are not caught by our existing tools and safeguards.
This role requires deep domain-specific expertise in identifying, understanding, and mitigating risk from violent attacks and behavior, and terrorist-related activity. You’ll need experience investigating sophisticated and harmful threats and the ability to navigate ambiguous signals in a complex and adversarial threat environment. You’ll need a proven ability to quickly learn new processes, systems and team dynamics while thriving in ambiguous, rapidly changing, and high-pressure environments.
This role will work PST hours and is remote-friendly, though you’re welcome to work from our San Francisco, New York, or Washington, DC offices if desired. The role will include resolving urgent escalations outside of normal work hours and on-call shift work. Investigations will involve sensitive content, including sexual, violent, or otherwise-disturbing material, to include child safety-related content. As such, you should have strong resiliency in managing similar high stress environments in the past.
In this role, you will:
Review leads, investigate activity and disrupt abusive operations in partnership with our policy, legal, and integrity teams focused on violent and terrorist activities, especially associated with time sensitive threat to life risks
Develop abuse signals and tracking strategies to help proactively detect harmful activity on our platform
Identify operational workflow improvements and processes that expedite work while still mitigating risk
Communicate investigation findings from your work with stakeholders internally and, at times, externally
Develop a categorical understanding of our products and data, and work with technical teams to improve our data and tooling
Support an on-call process and role that requires rapid threat triaging, investigation, mitigation, sound judgement and concise briefing to senior leadership
Be someone people enjoy working with and appreciate the opportunity to help others
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have deep expertise in counterterrorism and violent activity mitigation, ideally developed through law enforcement, legal, government, crisis response, social work, behavioral analysis units, special operations or similar environments
Have strong familiarity with technical investigations, especially using SQL and Python, in a government/military, think tank setting, and/or tech company
Have at least 12+ years of experience tracking or assessing threat actors in counterterrorism and/or violent activity domains, or conducting professional casework involving violent offenders, extremist actors, or high-risk individuals (e.g., through law enforcement investigations, threat assessment, behavioral analysis, psychology, or licensed social work) or in handling
Have at least two years of experience helping to develop automated approaches to accomplishing your work
Experience in presenting analytic work in public or policy settings
Speak another language, in addition to English
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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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
