About this role
About the Team
Our Safety Systems https://openai.com/safety/safety-systems team is at the forefront of OpenAI's mission to build and deploy safe AGI, driving our commitment to AI safety and fostering a culture of trust and transparency.
Within Safety Systems, the Model Policy team works to ensure that increasingly capable models behave safely and reliably in real-world environments. We investigate emerging model failures, define the behavior models should exhibit instead, and develop the data, evaluations, monitoring, and safeguards needed to improve and validate that behavior. Our work connects alignment research with the practical challenges of training and deploying frontier models.
About the Role
In this role, you will shape how OpenAI understands and addresses real-world risks that emerge from model misalignment as models become more autonomous and operate over longer horizons. You will investigate how misaligned behavior emerges across extended trajectories - including when models persist toward the wrong objective, take unsafe shortcuts, lose track of instructions, exploit weaknesses in their environment, or circumvent constraints - and translate these insights into behavioral policies, evaluations, monitoring, and safeguards. This role is ideal for someone who wants to turn alignment and safety concerns into concrete, empirically grounded improvements to frontier AI systems.
This role is based in our San Francisco office. We offer relocation support to new employees, and we use a hybrid model: three days in the office per week with optional work from home on Thursdays and Fridays.
Your Responsibilities:
- Identify vulnerabilities that emerge as models interact with tools, data, and external systems, and translate them into model- and system-level safeguards.
- Develop threat models and empirical frameworks for understanding harmful outcomes from misaligned behavior.
- Build frameworks for understanding harmful outcomes arising from model misalignment.
- Identify the underlying behaviors and system conditions that drive those outcomes.
- Turn findings into policy frameworks, evaluation criteria, online measurement and safeguards.
- Develop human data campaigns and gold sets to ground measurement and evaluation of emerging behaviors and risks.
- Partner with research, engineering, security, and product teams to shape model and system safety, balancing difficult trade-offs between safety, utility, and business risk.
- Inform deployment decisions, system cards, safeguards reports, and OpenAI’s broader approach to agentic safety.
- Build monitoring approaches that detect regressions and emerging risks after deployment.
We’re seeking someone who:
- Brings a strong background in AI agent safety, privacy, security, cybersecurity, or adjacent fields, with the adversarial mindset needed to investigate real-world harmful outcomes.
- Has demonstrated interest in AI alignment and a strong understanding of the technical dri