---
title: 'Engineering Manager, Guardian at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-manager-guardian-openai-london-384fs9y61gad'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-05'
---

# Engineering Manager, Guardian at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** London, United Kingdom
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-28
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/a02f6f9c-2006-41db-b9b3-04654f8dfd5a

## Job description

## About the Team

The Guardian team builds practical safety and oversight systems for increasingly capable AI agents. Our goal is to make it possible for agents to take on longer-running, higher-autonomy work while preserving meaningful safeguards, respecting user intent, and intervening when actions could cause serious or difficult-to-reverse harm. Auto-review is an early example of this work. When an agent reaches a permission boundary, a separate model evaluates the proposed action in context and determines whether it should proceed. The team is now extending this foundation into more capable oversight systems that account for richer user context, support a broader range of agent experiences, and integrate across OpenAI products. Guardian sits at the intersection of engineering, alignment research, product, infrastructure, and security. The team already has a strong engineering foundation in London and will continue to grow there as a concentrated, highly collaborative group.

## About the Role

We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead and grow the Guardian team in London. You will own the engineering strategy and execution for production systems that evaluate agent behavior, identify risk, and take appropriate action without creating unnecessary friction for users. This is a builder-manager role with substantial technical depth. You will set direction, develop engineers, and create the operating cadence for a high-performing team, while remaining close enough to the work to shape architecture, review designs, debug difficult problems, and write code when it is the highest-leverage way to help the team move forward. The role is highly visible and cross-functional. You will work closely with alignment researchers to translate emerging research into dependable systems, and with product teams to make agent safety a foundational capability across OpenAI. This role is based in our London office. In this role, you will

- Lead, hire, and develop a London-based team of engineers working across agent safety, backend systems, applied AI, and product infrastructure.
- Set the technical roadmap for Auto-review and the broader Guardian platform, balancing safety, product utility, latency, and operational reliability.
- Build production systems that evaluate agent actions in real time, detect potentially harmful behavior, and support safe recovery or escalation paths.
- Improve how oversight systems understand user intent, environmental context, permissions, and relevant personalization signals while protecting privacy and avoiding unnecessary friction.
- Partner closely with alignment researchers to turn prototypes, evaluations, and new monitoring techniques into scalable product capabilities.
- Work across Product, Security, Infrastructure, and other engineering teams to integrate Guardian capabilities into agent experiences throughout OpenAI.
- Establish rigorous evaluation and operational practices, including adversarial testing, failure analysis, monitoring, and metrics for safety performance, false positives, latency, and user impact.

You might thrive in this role if you

- Have significant experience leading engineering teams that shipped complex, high-stakes production systems end to end.
- Have built with AI agents or large language models in a core product, startup, or technically serious independent project, and understand the unique challenges of agentic systems.
- Bring strong product-engineering judgment and can navigate tradeoffs across safety, usability, speed, and reliability.
- Can partner effectively with research teams, translate open-ended findings into engineering plans, and communicate clearly across technical disciplines.
- Have a thoughtful management system for hiring, coaching, performance, and execution.
- Care deeply about building AI systems that are useful, trustworthy, and safe.

## 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/)

## Other roles at OpenAI

- [Product Marketing Lead, Verticals](https://feeny.ai/job/product-marketing-lead-verticals-openai-san-francisco-gr14px0thhk0) — San Francisco, CA
- [Forward Deployed Engineering Manager, Financial Services](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineering-manager-financial-services-openai-new-york-12pj7jgmdk3t) — New York, NY
- [Executive Business Partner, EMEA (Strategy)](https://feeny.ai/job/executive-business-partner-emea-strategy-openai-london-994tph608a2r) — London, United Kingdom
- [Sales Manager, Startups | New Business UK&I](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-manager-startups-new-business-uk-i-openai-london-w0tqrgw7mzms) — London, United Kingdom
- [Sales Development Leader,  Singapore](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-development-leader-singapore-openai-singapore-4h8wk13ks5p8) — Singapore
- [AI Deployment Manager - Builder](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-deployment-manager-builder-openai-singapore-zenefcsbjerr) — Singapore
- [Technical Program Manager, Capacity Analytics & Tooling](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-program-manager-capacity-analytics-tooling-openai-san-francisco-1h1atz8ka5gq) — San Francisco, CA
- [Technical Program Manager, Research Compute Services](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-program-manager-research-compute-services-openai-san-francisco-49tb2pwpnhea) — San Francisco, CA
- [Technical Program Manager, Global Infrastructure Planning](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-program-manager-global-infrastructure-planning-openai-san-francisco-jxbew9w0b55t) — San Francisco, CA
- [Technical Program Manager, Compute Infrastructure](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-program-manager-compute-infrastructure-openai-san-francisco-p48nrtxk8479) — San Francisco, CA