Safety Response Operations Lead

About the Team

At OpenAI, the Trust, Safety & Risk Operations teams protect our products, users, and the company from abuse, fraud, scams, regulatory issues, and other emerging challenges. This group works at the crossroads of operations, compliance, user trust, and safety, collaborating closely with Legal, Policy, Engineering, Product, Go-To-Market, and external partners to ensure that our platforms are secure, compliant, and trusted by a diverse user base worldwide.

Role Overview

The Global Safety Response Operations Lead manages a regional team that handles the most urgent user safety, risk, and escalation cases within OpenAI’s products. This 24/7 role involves both leadership responsibilities and direct involvement in complex, high-stakes case management. The Lead oversees the highest priority escalations, ensuring alignment with policy and delivering empathetic, consistent user support.

Key Responsibilities

• Manage and mentor a team of Safety Response Analysts, fostering strong performance, engagement, and high-quality decision making.
• Be accountable for regional operational metrics such as utilization, SLA compliance, backlog management, and quality standards.
• Personally handle and supervise the most sensitive and complex cases, acting as the first escalation point and incident lead within the region.
• Devote 20–30% of time to frontline activities including investigations, enforcement decisions, and legal or regulatory escalations.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with departments like Product, Policy, Legal, Investigations, and local teams to implement effective safety measures and manage risk.
• Drive operational improvements by enhancing workflows, tools, automation, and escalation procedures.
• Spot emerging risks and patterns, transforming frontline insights into actionable recommendations for policies, products, or enforcement strategies.

Preferred Experience and Skills

• Minimum 5 years of experience in trust and safety, risk operations, investigations, fraud detection, annotation, or platform integrity roles.
• At least 4 years of experience in people leadership or senior operational management roles.
• Proven ability to make sound decisions in ambiguous, high-risk situations balancing speed, accuracy, and defensibility.
• Excellent communication skills to clearly convey complex safety and risk assessments, including drafting escalation reports and coordinating with Legal, Policy, Product, and leadership during incidents.
• Capacity to translate between operations and strategic stakeholders, turning complex cases into structured insights and converting policies into actionable team directives.
• Strong influence skills without formal authority, building trusted partnerships with internal teams and external stakeholders to ensure coordinated responses.
• Deep understanding of content moderation, user safety, fraud prevention, or developer risk frameworks including related legal, policy, and technical aspects.
• Experience leveraging data, tools, and automation to enhance quality, efficiency, and scaling of safety responses.
• Comfortable leading in a demanding 24/7 operational environment, providing steady, credible leadership through incidents, workload spikes, and regulatory or reputational challenges.

Additional Information

OpenAI champions equal employment opportunity and does not discriminate based on legally protected characteristics. Background checks will be performed in compliance with applicable laws, with fair consideration given to candidates with criminal histories where relevant. Reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities are available upon request. OpenAI is committed to privacy and compliance standards, supporting a safe and inclusive workplace. This role requires availability for rotating shifts, including nights, weekends, and holidays, due to the 24/7 nature of the operation.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is a pioneering AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity. Our mission focuses on creating safe AI products by incorporating diverse perspectives and valuing ethical responsibility throughout development and deployment.