---
title: 'Device Safety & Risk Operations Specialist, User Safety & Risk Operations at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/device-safety-risk-operations-specialist-user-safety-risk-operations-openai-san-hrz0tqjjjey7'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Device Safety & Risk Operations Specialist, User Safety & Risk Operations at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $252k–$335k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-06-26
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/24f3c017-d844-4df1-bc52-71f95b6e731d/application

**Skills:** Device safety, Product safety, Consumer hardware operations, Technical program management, Incident response, Case management, Data analysis, Telemetry, Access controls, Audit logs, Automation, Workflow design, Tabletop exercises, Risk management, Connected devices, Product-safety investigations, Recalls, Field failures, Safety advisories, Hazardous-product handling

> Build the safety operating model for new consumer hardware, defining incident taxonomies, escalation criteria, and operational workflows. This senior individual-contributor role involves establishing durable systems for product-safety incidents, regulated cases, and privacy-sensitive issues while collaborating with...

## Job description

## 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 team focused on building operational capacity for new, ambiguous, and fast-moving areas of work. The team defines 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.

## About the Role

We are seeking a Device Safety & Risk Operations Specialist to build the safety operating model for a new category of consumer hardware. This is a senior individual-contributor role for someone who can turn emerging product risks and incomplete requirements into practical workflows, controls, launch plans, and durable systems. You will define how product-safety incidents, critical escalations, regulated cases, and privacy-sensitive issues should be identified, investigated, escalated, resolved, and learned from. You will also establish operational requirements for case management, data access, decision logging, quality assurance, monitoring, and cross-functional response. You will stand up priority workflows through launch and early operations, then help transition them into durable homes across USRO and partner teams. The right person combines deep operational judgment with strong technical and hardware product fluency. They can move from executive-level risk framing to detailed workflow design, tabletop exercises, launch readiness, frontline guidance, and post-launch improvement. Location / work model: San Francisco, CA; hybrid, 3 days/week in-office. Please note: This role may involve exposure to sensitive or concerning material. Strong discretion, judgment, and resilience are essential.

In This Role, You Will:

- Build the end-to-end safety and risk operating model for new consumer hardware, from early requirements through launch and early-life operations.
- Define incident taxonomies, severity levels, decision rights, escalation criteria, response pathways, and closure standards.
- Develop operational playbooks for product-safety incidents, critical escalations, safety advisories, corrective actions, and other high-risk events.
- Design workflows for regulated and privacy-sensitive cases, including restricted handling, evidence requirements, auditability, and partner escalation.
- Translate safety and operational needs into requirements for tooling, case management, data access, monitoring, logging, and automation.
- Establish clear ownership boundaries across Product, Engineering, Legal, Privacy, Product Policy, Support, Product Quality, and other operational partners.
- Build launch-readiness plans, tabletop exercises, training, quality controls, reporting, and post-launch monitoring.
- Use operational data, customer signals, product telemetry, and case outcomes to identify patterns and improve upstream products and systems.
- Determine where AI and automation can improve triage, evidence assembly, consistency, and response while preserving appropriate human judgment.
- Stand up priority workflows, operate them through launch and early-life stabilization, and transition them into durable homes across USRO and partner teams.

You Might Thrive in This Role If You:

- Have 8+ years of relevant experience in device safety, product safety, consumer hardware operations, technical program management, or a related field.
- Have built a complex safety or risk program from an ambiguous starting point through launch and scaled operation.
- Understand the realities of handling high-severity incidents, regulated workflows, sensitive customer information, and time-critical escalations.
- Can translate product, engineering, legal, privacy, and policy constraints into workflows that operational teams can execute.
- Are technically fluent and can reason through data flows, telemetry, access controls, audit logs, case systems, automation, and failure modes.
- Use data to assess workflow health, identify emerging patterns, evaluate quality, and make risk-based decisions.
- Can establish clear accountability across teams with overlapping responsibilities and different risk tolerances.
- Know how to balance launch speed with safety controls, monitoring, rollback criteria, and longer-term system development.
- Communicate clearly with operational, technical, legal, and executive audiences when evidence is incomplete or tradeoffs are difficult.
- Are highly practical and willing to build the workflow, not only define the strategy.
- Experience supporting consumer hardware, connected devices, or other products used in shared environments.
- Experience with product-safety investigations, recalls, field failures, safety advisories, or hazardous-product handling.
- Experience designing workflows involving privacy-sensitive sensor, diagnostic, media, or household data.
- Familiarity with warranty, repair, reverse logistics, identity recovery, fraud, or ownership disputes.
- Experience building vendor training, quality-assurance, incident-response, or specialist-review programs.

## 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](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf). 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](https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA). 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](https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241). [OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf) 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.

## About OpenAI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.
- **Entity Type**: Private – structured as a nonprofit parent (OpenAI Foundation) governing a for-profit public benefit corporation (OpenAI Group). The company has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, signaling a potential future IPO.
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and others

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence research and deployment
- **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises via API and platform), B2C (ChatGPT users), and developers (API, open-source models)
- **Mission**: To ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity.

## Products & Services
- **[ChatGPT](https://openai.com/chatgpt)**: Conversational AI assistant available via web and mobile, used by consumers and integrated into enterprise workflows.
- **[GPT-4 API](https://openai.com/product)**: Large language model accessed via API for developers to build AI-powered applications (text generation, summarization, code assistance, etc.).
- **[DALL-E](https://openai.com/dall-e-3)**: Image generation model that creates images from natural language descriptions.
- **[Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper)**: Open-source speech recognition system.
- **[OpenAI Agents](https://openai.com/)**: Emerging product category focused on autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks on behalf of users (announced June 2026).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed in the provided sources. Widely reported in the press at ~$300 billion as of early 2026 (post-funding round), but this figure is not confirmed by OpenAI’s official materials.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding exceeds $13 billion from Microsoft and other investors. The company has also confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC (see [openai.com](https://openai.com/) – “Confidential submission of draft S-1”).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Microsoft (strategic partner and largest investor), with additional participation from Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others.
- **Growth Signals**: Active hiring with 721 open roles posted; expansion into agent-based products; confidential IPO filing; continued deployment of frontier models.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover & brand recognition**: ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, establishing OpenAI as the household name in generative AI.
- **Research leadership**: Consistently publishes cutting-edge research (GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Whisper, etc.) and attracts top AI talent.
- **Compute & infrastructure**: Exclusive partnership with Microsoft provides massive cloud computing resources (Azure) for training and inference.
- **Unique governance structure**: The nonprofit parent ensures mission alignment (AGI benefiting humanity) while the for-profit arm can raise capital and scale products.

## Strategic Focus
- **Safe AGI development**: Continued emphasis on safety research, alignment, and responsible deployment (e.g., safety systems, model provenance).
- **Enterprise expansion**: Growing ChatGPT Enterprise and API offerings for businesses.
- **Agentic AI**: Building autonomous agents that can “transform work” (announced June 2026).
- **IPO preparation**: Confidential S-1 filing indicates intent to go public, which will require increased financial transparency and governance maturity.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & values**: OpenAI’s stated values include “Humanity first,” “Act with humility,” “Feel the AGI,” and “Ship joy.” Operating principles emphasize agency, creativity, rapid iteration, and intense focus.
- **Benefits**: Competitive health insurance, mental healthcare support, 24-week paid birth-parent leave (plus 20 weeks for other parents), generous PTO, annual learning & development stipend, daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), and a domestic conference budget.
- **Work environment**: Hybrid/office-based (San Francisco headquarters). The company offers a residency program for researchers and engineers transitioning into AI.
- **Impact**: Employees work directly on frontier AI models that shape the industry and society. The mission-driven nature attracts talent passionate about AGI’s societal implications.

## Sources
1. [OpenAI About Page](https://openai.com/about/)
2. [OpenAI Careers Page](https://openai.com/careers/)
3. [OpenAI Job Search](https://openai.com/careers/search)
4. [OpenAI Homepage](https://openai.com/)

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