Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
### Why this Role is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Identity is a foundational layer in modern SaaS, shaping who can access a product, how smoothly they onboard, and how well the platform resists fraud and abuse. This Data Scientist role sits directly on that boundary between conversion and protection, where measurement choices influence both revenue flow and platform integrity. Because it spans consumer and enterprise entry points, the work reflects a common SaaS reality: one identity surface area serving multiple product motions.
For a SaaS data science career, the standout element is ownership of the analytical “source of truth” for an end to end journey that touches acquisition, activation, and risk. Establishing north star metrics, experimentation frameworks, and causal approaches when A B tests are not possible builds durable skills that transfer across product analytics, growth, and trust and safety teams. The cross functional partnerships described also mirror how decisions get made in mature SaaS organizations.
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 Financial Engineering and Identity data science team owns how revenue flows through our products and builds the systems that enable people and organizations to access OpenAI products safely, seamlessly, and at global scale.
Identity sits at the critical intersection of growth, trust, and user experience. The team owns the experiences and infrastructure behind sign up, sign in, account recovery, authentication, and identity integrations across both consumer and enterprise products. As OpenAI expands across products and markets, Identity plays an increasingly important role in helping more users get started quickly while protecting them from abuse, fraud, and account compromise.
About the Role
We're looking for the first dedicated Data Scientist to partner with the Identity organization. In this role, you will define how we measure success across the entire identity journey—from first-time sign up and onboarding through authentication, account recovery, and enterprise identity experiences. You'll develop the experimentation frameworks, metrics, and analytical approaches that guide product decisions while helping the team navigate one of Identity's core challenges: optimizing growth while maintaining trust and security.
You'll work closely with Product, Engineering, Design, Abuse, Risk, and Go-to-Market teams to identify opportunities, quantify trade-offs, and influence strategy. Some questions can be answered through A/B tests. Others require observational analyses, causal inference, and judgment under uncertainty.
This is an opportunity to shape the analytical foundations of a high-impact product area from the ground up.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid model (3 days/week in office) and offer relocation support.
In this role, you will
Define the north-star metrics and measurement frameworks used to evaluate the identity experience across consumer and enterprise products.
Design and analyze experiments to optimize top-of-funnel performance, including sign up, sign in, onboarding, and account recovery experiences.
Partner with Identity Product and Engineering teams to improve activation, authentication success, and user experience while maintaining appropriate safeguards.
Quantify and communicate trade-offs between growth objectives and abuse prevention outcomes, including risks such as fraud and account takeover.
Develop methodologies to evaluate identity initiatives when randomized experimentation is not feasible, leveraging causal inference and observational analyses.
Establish reporting and executive-facing metrics that provide visibility into Identity health, funnel performance, and emerging opportunities.
Build source-of-truth datasets, dashboards, and analytical systems that enable scalable decision-making across the Identity organization.
Help shape the culture of data-informed decision-making as the first Data Scientist dedicated to Identity.
You might thrive in this role if you have
8+ years of experience in product data science, experimentation, product analytics
Experience owning product funnels and driving improvements through experimentation and measurement.
Strong expertise designing experiments and applying causal inference methods in production environments.
Experience partnering closely with Product and Engineering teams to solve ambiguous, cross-functional problems.
The ability to translate complex analytical findings into clear recommendations for both technical partners and senior leadership.
Advanced proficiency in SQL and Python.
A track record of independently defining metrics, building analytical frameworks, and influencing product strategy.
Experience working on identity, authentication, trust and safety, fraud, abuse prevention, growth, or other user-facing platform problems is a plus, but not required.
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.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy
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.
