Strategic Operations Lead, User Safety & Risk Operations

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.

This role sits on a new team within USRO focused on building operational capacity for new, ambiguous, or fast-moving areas of work. The team helps define what needs to be built, creates the operating model to support it, and works with partner teams to make the work scalable and durable over time.

As a Strategic Operations Lead, you will focus on large, cross-functional initiatives that require clear thinking, technical fluency, strong execution, and the ability to bring structure to undefined problems.

About the Role

We are seeking a Strategic Operations Lead to drive new and existing strategic operating builds across User Safety & Risk Operations. This is a senior IC role for someone who can turn broad, undefined priorities into clear operating models, launch plans, requirements, stakeholder alignment, documentation, reporting, and execution rhythms.

This role will often support initiatives where OpenAI is developing new products or partnerships and the operating model is still being defined. These programs have a direct user safety and risk nexus because new deployment models can change what signals OpenAI can see, who owns response decisions, and how user-impacting risks are detected, escalated, and resolved. You will clarify what OpenAI owns, what partner teams own, what signals we can reliably monitor, how issues should be escalated, and how the workflow should evolve from launch support into a durable operating model.

The right person is highly strategic and deeply practical. They can move from executive-level framing to detailed workflow design, stakeholder management, SOPs, launch readiness, risk tracking, and implementation. They are technically comfortable, AI-fluent, analytically strong, and able to coordinate effectively across Product, Engineering, Legal, Policy, Support, Partnerships, and Operations, including external stakeholders.

Location: San Francisco, CA; hybrid, 3 days/week in-office.

In This Role, You Will:

• Lead strategic operational builds from ambiguous problem statement to implemented operating model, including scope, owners, workflows, milestones, risks, and success measures.

• Build launch and early-life operating models for complex partner deployments, including monitoring cadence, escalation paths, ownership maps, reporting expectations, and follow-up mechanisms.

• Translate technical, policy, safety, privacy, and operational constraints into practical workflows that teams can execute.

• Define how safety and risk signals should be monitored, reviewed, packaged, escalated, and tracked through resolution.

• Partner with senior leaders across USRO and cross-functional teams to translate business, product, safety, and operational needs into clear execution plans.

• Use data and operational signals to understand workflow health, capacity needs, bottlenecks, quality gaps, and risks.

• Identify where AI tools, automation, lightweight systems, or better workflows can reduce operational burden and improve consistency.

• Keep operating models current as data pipelines, tooling, dashboards, partner processes, and ownership mature.

You Might Thrive in This Role If You

• 8+ years of experience in operations, strategy and operations, product operations, technical program management, trust and safety operations, risk operations, implementation or management consulting, or a related field.

• Track record of leading complex, ambiguous work from problem framing through execution.

• Strong technical fluency, including the ability to reason through data flows, system ownership, logs, dashboards, tooling gaps, and failure modes.

• Strong data literacy, including experience using SQL, spreadsheets, dashboards, and metrics to analyze workflows, assess risk, identify gaps, and drive decision making.

• Comfortable operating where data access, tooling, ownership, or policy thresholds are incomplete or changing.

• Able to work closely with Product, Engineering, Data Science, and technical operations teams; ask the right questions; and translate technical constraints into operational requirements.

• Pragmatic about sequencing: knows what must be ready for launch, what can be monitored before action is taken, and what needs to become durable over time.

• AI-fluent, with a track record of using AI tools to move faster, improve quality, or create operational leverage.

• Strong interpersonal judgment, with the ability to build trust across teams while keeping ownership, accountability, and escalation paths clear.

• Implementation-oriented and comfortable building the workflow, not just defining the strategy.

• Able to operate at a fast pace while staying organized, calm, and effective in high-ambiguity environments.

• Tool-agnostic and resourceful, with a track record of quickly learning unfamiliar systems and building effective solutions with limited resources, including lightweight tools, AI-assisted workflows, dashboards, documentation, and process design.

Nice to Have

• Experience supporting cloud, enterprise, infrastructure, platform, or partner-hosted deployments.

• Experience building launch-readiness or post-launch monitoring processes for complex technical programs.

• Experience designing workflows that include escalation paths, QA, capacity planning, reporting, and long-term ownership transitions.

• Experience in implementation-focused consulting, product operations, technical program management, or strategy and operations roles where success depended on execution, not only planning.

• Experience prototyping lightweight tools, automations, dashboards, or workflow improvements using AI-assisted development tools such as Codex, low-code/no-code platforms, SQL, spreadsheets, or scripting.

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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