Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Frontier AI products have SaaS-like distribution and iteration cycles, but they also introduce platform-level abuse and integrity risks that must be managed continuously. This role sits where operational reality meets analytics and automation, building the measurement and tooling that lets a safety function keep pace with product adoption. It is notable in the SaaS ecosystem because it treats trust, safety, and risk as an operating system problem, not a collection of manual reviews.
For a SaaS career, the long-term value is learning how to scale decision-making under uncertainty using data infrastructure, monitoring, and feedback loops. The work spans workflow design, quality measurement, and automation choices, including where AI assistance is appropriate and where human judgment must remain central. That combination maps well to modern SaaS patterns: instrumenting systems, setting service levels, and turning operational signals into durable product and process improvements.
This role tends to fit professionals who enjoy translating ambiguous, high-stakes workflows into measurable systems and who can lead senior specialists without over-prescribing solutions. It will appeal to those who like cross-functional operating models with product, engineering, and policy partners, and who are comfortable being accountable for prioritization tradeoffs in a risk-sensitive domain.
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
At OpenAI, our User Safety & Risk Operations (USRO) team helps protect our products and users from abuse, fraud, safety risks, and other forms of misuse. We operate at the front line of real-world safety and risk management, translating user and operational signals into timely decisions, effective interventions, and improvements to our systems.
The Analytics & Automation team helps USRO operate more effectively and scale safely. The team builds automation, analytics, reporting, monitoring, and quality systems that improve how work is prioritized, reviewed, measured, and managed across the organization’s portfolio.
Our work includes workflow automation, operational health dashboards, queue and case analysis, quality measurement, classifier and evaluation feedback loops, alerting, reporting infrastructure, and decision-support tools. We partner closely with operational teams as well as Product, Engineering, Product Policy, Safety, and Support to identify high-leverage opportunities and build practical systems that improve outcomes.
About the Role
We are seeking an Analytics & Automation Lead to manage and grow a senior technical operations team responsible for building the analytics, automation, and quality systems that help User Safety and Risk Operations scale.
This is a hands-on leadership role for a mission-oriented systems thinker: someone who can translate messy operational problems into practical, measurable solutions; guide senior technical and analytical ICs (Independent Contributors); prioritize across competing needs;, and build durable infrastructure and reusable capabilities that improve the performance of multiple operational teams.
You will lead work across workflow automation, operational health analytics, quality and evaluation systems, emerging-risk signal infrastructure, dashboards and reporting, and data flywheel feedback loops.You will help determine where automation can meaningfully improve speed, consistency, and scalability, and where human judgment and strong quality controls must remain central.
The right person is highly technical for an operations role, deeply comfortable with ambiguity, and fluent in using AI tools to improve real workflows. Success in this role means building systems that make safety operations faster, more reliable, more measurable, and more scalable without losing the human judgment required for sensitive user-safety decisions.
Location / work model: San Francisco, CA; hybrid, 3 days/week in-office.
Please note: This role may involve exposure to sensitive or concerning content. Strong discretion, judgment, and resilience are essential.
In This Role, You Will
Lead and develop a senior team of technical and analytical ICs responsible for automation, analytics, reporting, and other systems.
Set the strategy and operating cadence for a horizontal team supporting safety and risk operations across multiple workflows and domains.
Prioritize a portfolio of high-impact opportunities, making clear tradeoffs based on user impact, risk reduction, operational need, technical feasibility, and scalability.
Build systems that improve operational health and visibility, including data infrastructure, dashboards, SLA and backlog monitoring, and quality measurement.
Design and implement workflow improvements such as automated triage, routing, prioritization, signal enrichment, case clustering, review assistance, and reporting automation.
Build and improve the systems and strategies for emerging risk identification, analysis, and signal sharing
Identify where AI, LLMs, classifiers, or lightweight tooling can materially improve operational work, while designing appropriate evaluation, monitoring, human review, and fallback paths.
Establish measurement and quality frameworks for operational systems, including golden sets, sampling strategies, reviewer calibration, false-positive and false-negative monitoring, and system-health metrics.
Partner with operational leaders to understand their workflows, identify root causes and bottlenecks, and turn high-value needs into scalable systems rather than one-off analyses.
Collaborate with Product, Engineering, Policy, Legal, Safety, Support, and other partner teams to translate user and operational insights into better tools, processes, and outcomes.
Raise the bar for technical judgment, written communication, prioritization, and execution across a senior, independent team.
You Might Thrive in This Role If You
Have 12+ years of relevant experience across trust and safety, risk operations, data, analytics, automation, product operations, integrity, fraud, or similarly high-stakes operational environments.
Have 4+ years of people management experience, including experience leading senior technical, analytical, or highly independent ICs.
Are highly technical for an operations leader: comfortable with SQL, dashboards, data quality, classifier/eval concepts, automation design, and practical AI tooling.
Experience working with LLMs, agentic workflows, Codex-like tools, or internal AI platforms to automate operational work.
Have built systems that materially improved how operational work gets done, such as workflow automation, triage or routing systems, detection workflows, operational reporting, or classifier feedback loops.
Can distinguish high-value automation from risky automation, and know how to design human-in-the-loop review, monitoring, quality controls, and fallback mechanisms for sensitive workflows.
Bring strong operational judgment and understand the realities of running complex workflows at scale, including queues, reviewer processes, escalations, capacity constraints, and quality assurance.
Communicate clearly and concisely with technical, operational, and executive audiences, especially when tradeoffs are complex or evidence is incomplete.
Operate with high agency in ambiguous environments and can create structure, momentum, and measurable progress without overbuilding.
Are mission-oriented, user-safety minded, and motivated by building systems that make frontier AI products safer and more trustworthy.
Nice to Have
Experience in trust and safety, adversarial abuse, integrity, risk operations, or user safety at a scaled technology company.
Experience with classifier development, eval design, golden sets, labeling guidance, reviewer calibration, or model-quality feedback loops.
Experience leading analytics or automation work that supports multiple partner teams or business lines.
Experience building quality programs, audit processes, or decision records for sensitive or regulated workflows.
Familiarity with vendor operations, BPO training, QA, or scaled review programs.
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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