Cyber Operations Lead, Critical Harm Operations

About the Team

Critical Harm Operations sits within User Safety & Risk Operations and builds enforcement systems for the most severe user-safety risks—including Frontier Risk and Material Harm—that are accurate, fast, defensible, and scalable. The Cyber vertical turns policy into reviewer standards, calibrated judgment, quality systems, escalation paths, and safe automation.

About the Role

We’re looking for a senior cybersecurity and cyber intelligence practitioner who is also an operations leader, strategist, and people manager. You’ll bring sound cyber judgment, strong analytical and automation instincts, and the ability to stay close to the work while setting direction, managing and developing people, aligning partners, building programs from 0→1, and translating ambiguity into durable operating systems.

This role combines senior individual-contributor depth with direct people-management accountability. You’ll personally shape complex cyber judgments, operating models, SOPs, quality systems, and automation strategies while building, coaching, and holding accountable a high-performing team. You’ll also lead through influence across FTEs, BPO partners, and cross-functional teams. Baseline operational health—including quality, queue coverage, productivity, and SLA adherence—is table stakes; success is additionally measured by durable improvements to decision quality, stakeholder alignment, reviewer capability, and the systems that run the operation.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Set the strategic direction for Cyber Operations and translate high-level organizational priorities into a clear operating model, roadmaps, SOPs, escalation paths, quality goals, and safe-access strategies.

• Serve as the senior cybersecurity and cyber intelligence expert for complex and high-risk decisions across ChatGPT, API, Codex, agents, and emerging product surfaces.

• Build trust, create clarity, navigate disagreement, and move people through ambiguity across FTEs, BPO partners, and cross-functional teams.

• Turn policy ambiguity, quality misses, appeals, and reviewer disagreement into clear decision rules, calibration examples, training, and tooling requirements.

• Build and scale reviewer capability through onboarding, certification, coaching, feedback, recurring calibration, and close partnership with vendor leadership.

• Own operational health across Cyber Operations, including queue coverage, reviewer productivity, quality metrics, SLA adherence, escalation hygiene, and proactive identification of performance gaps before downstream teams need to flag them.

• Use analysis and automation to diagnose root causes, surface risk, prioritize high-leverage fixes, and reduce manual effort.

• Build durable quality and evaluation systems that improve decision quality through calibration, adjudication, monitoring, and feedback loops.

• Build new operational capabilities from 0→1, then scale them: define the problem, align partners, test the model, establish metrics, and turn what works into repeatable operations.

• Present crisp recommendations, tradeoffs, and operational strategy to executives and internal and external partners; represent Cyber Operations in high-stakes discussions and launch decisions.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 8+ years of experience in cybersecurity, cyber intelligence, threat intelligence, incident response, security research, or a related field, including 4+ years of leading teams.

• Built and scaled a cyber operations, cyber intelligence, or abuse-prevention capability across regions, products, or a large user base.

• Designed and launched human-in-the-loop automation or evaluation systems that materially improved safety, quality, or operational scale.

• Bring strong cyber judgment and can reason deeply about attacker behavior, emerging threats, abuse patterns, and ambiguous dual-use activity.

• Have built or improved high-stakes operations, reviewer programs, QA systems, escalation workflows, or vendor/BPO programs—and can translate high-level strategy into execution.

• Are highly analytical and can turn operational data into clear priorities, root-cause diagnoses, and measurable improvements.

• Have a record of creating programs, workflows, or teams in ambiguous environments; you are a self-starter who creates structure and follows through.

• Can influence across organizations, coach others, navigate disagreement, and bring people together across functions and levels.

• Have exceptional executive presence and presentation skills; you can distill complex cyber risk into crisp recommendations, tradeoffs, and decisions for senior leaders.

• Bring exceptional customer-service acumen: understand user and partner needs, communicate with empathy and precision, de-escalate sensitive situations, and balance safety with a high-quality experience.

• Can translate complex cyber and policy judgment into reviewer-usable SOPs, decision trees, training, and concise written recommendations.

• Exercise sound judgment and discretion when handling sensitive material.

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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