Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Work on frontier biological and chemical risk sits at an unusual intersection of SaaS-style product deployment and high-stakes safety governance. OpenAI operates as an AI research and deployment organization, and this role reflects how modern AI platforms increasingly need rigorous measurement and mitigation systems alongside model capability advances. The emphasis on evaluations, auditable artifacts, and launch decision support signals a mature approach to operating powerful models in production-like settings.
For a SaaS career, the durable value here is learning how to translate ambiguous, emerging risk into repeatable processes that leadership can rely on. Designing datasets, rubrics, graders, and thresholds maps closely to how SaaS companies build quality gates, monitoring, and reliability frameworks, but applied to model behavior and misuse scenarios. The coordination component also mirrors cross-functional operating rhythms common in SaaS, where research, engineering, and policy constraints meet release schedules.
This role tends to suit professionals who like end-to-end ownership, from problem framing through system design and ongoing maintenance. It is a strong match for those motivated by measurement discipline, clear documentation, and iterative improvement, particularly when the “customer” is internal decision-makers preparing for high-impact launches.
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
Preparedness is a critical Safety Research team at OpenAI, which is focused on mitigating AI threats to global security that could scale to an extreme level of severity.
Our work involves:
Measurement. Monitoring and predicting the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems.
Mitigation. Keeping misuse safeguards, alignment tools, and security measures on track to adequately address extreme threats that might arise in the future.
Coordination. Setting mitigation targets by maintaining OpenAI’s preparedness framework, and partnering with other staff to achieve these targets.
This is urgent, fast-paced work that has far-reaching implications for the company and for society.
About the Role
We are looking to hire exceptional research engineers that can push the boundaries of our frontier models. Specifically, we are looking for those that will help us shape our empirical grasp of the whole spectrum of AI safety concerns and will own individual threads within this endeavor end-to-end.
You will own the scientific validity of our frontier preparedness capability evaluations—designing new evals grounded in real threat models (including high-consequence domains like CBRN as well as cyber and other frontier-risk areas), and maintaining existing evals so they don’t stale or silently regress. You’ll define datasets, graders, rubrics, and threshold guidance, and produce auditable artifacts (evaluation cards, capability reports, system-card inputs) that leadership can trust during high-stakes launches.
In this role, you'll:
Work on identifying emerging AI safety risks and new methodologies for exploring the impact of these risks
Build (and then continuously refine) evaluations of frontier AI models that assess the extent of identified risks
Design and build scalable systems and processes that can support these kinds of evaluations
Contribute to the refinement of risk management and the overall development of "best practice" guidelines for AI safety evaluations
You might thrive in this role if you:
Are passionate and knowledgeable about short-term and long-term AI safety risks
Demonstrate the ability to think outside the box and have a robust “red-teaming mindset”
Have experience in ML research engineering, ML observability and monitoring, creating large language model-enabled applications, and/or another technical domain applicable to AI risk
Are able to operate effectively in a dynamic and extremely fast-paced research environment as well as scope and deliver projects end-to-end
It would be great if you also have:
First-hand experience in red-teaming systems—be it computer systems or otherwise
A good understanding of the (nuances of) societal aspects of AI deployment
Excellent communication skills and the ability to work cross-functionally
This role may require access to technology or technical data controlled under the U.S. Export Administration Regulations or International Traffic in Arms Regulations. Therefore, this role is restricted to individuals described in paragraph (a)(1) of the definition of “U.S. person” in the U.S. Export Administration Regulations, 15 C.F.R. § 772.1, and in the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, 22 C.F.R. § 120.62. U.S. persons are U.S. citizens, U.S. legal permanent residents, individuals granted asylum status in the United States, and individuals admitted to the United States as refugees.
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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