---
title: 'Technical Program Manager, AI Safety & Safeguards at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/technical-program-manager-ai-safety-safeguards-openai-san-francisco-ev038d70w5zx'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-24'
---

# Technical Program Manager, AI Safety & Safeguards at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $207k–$445k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-08-18
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-24
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/3a05c5d7-fdd9-4e0e-823a-2ae08b59958b

## Job description

## About the Team

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Safely delivering increasingly capable AI systems requires scalable technical safeguards, clear ownership of emerging risks, rigorous deployment readiness, and close coordination across research, engineering, product, operations, legal, policy, and external partners. Our Technical Program Managers lead complex, high-stakes initiatives that turn safety commitments into deployed systems and measurable outcomes. We work across model development, infrastructure, product, and operational response to help ensure our technology is deployed responsibly and cannot be used to cause serious real-world harm.

## About the Role

We’re seeking Technical Program Managers to drive complex product, platform, and safety initiatives across ChatGPT, API, enterprise, and related deployment environments. These roles operate at the intersection of technical strategy and execution: you will turn safety and product priorities into actionable plans, influence architectural and operational decisions, and deliver durable capabilities across model, infrastructure, application, and platform layers. Depending on the role, you may enable sensitive or high-impact model deployments, integrate safeguards into cloud and API platforms, prevent violent misuse and other serious harms, improve detection and enforcement systems, create platform solutions for safety or establish new programs as risks evolve. You will partner deeply with engineers, researchers, product managers, and operational teams while communicating technical tradeoffs and program decisions to senior leadership. You bring technical fluency, product judgment, and a strong execution record. You’re comfortable navigating ambiguity, advocating for users and developers, balancing safety with model usefulness, and leading cross-functional work with urgency, rigor, and empathy. Specific focus areas and scope will vary by opening and level. 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:

- Partner with product, engineering, research, and design to shape technical roadmaps, long-term platform direction, and safeguards priorities across ChatGPT, API, enterprise, and cloud environments.
- Translate product and safety objectives into execution plans that balance near-term delivery, long-term platform evolution, customer needs, and responsible deployment.
- Lead cross-functional programs end to end—from problem definition and technical design through implementation, launch, iteration, and operational follow-through.
- Own milestones, dependencies, risk mitigation, decision-making, and accountability across engineering, infrastructure, integrity, trust and safety, legal, policy, operations, and go-to-market teams.
- Partner with engineers on system architecture, public and internal APIs, cloud deployment patterns, platform integrations, operational failure modes, and technical tradeoffs.
- Drive the development, integration, or rollout of safeguards such as model evaluations, post-training mitigations, classifiers, abuse detection, monitoring, enforcement workflows, human review, and agent-assisted review.
- Coordinate readiness for sensitive or high-impact deployments, ensuring appropriate safety coverage, escalation paths, operational controls, and alignment with external cloud or enterprise partners.
- Identify emerging misuse and severe-harm risks; define ownership and response mechanisms across prevention, detection, investigation, enforcement, and continuous improvement.
- Establish meaningful metrics for program delivery, deployment readiness, safety effectiveness, operational quality, and user or developer experience.
- Represent customer and developer needs in technical and leadership decisions, balancing risk reduction, model usefulness, implementation complexity, speed, and scale.
- Communicate program health, risks, recommendations, and consequential tradeoffs clearly to engineering teams, cross-functional partners, and executives.
- Improve delivery and safety outcomes through practical operating mechanisms, scalable tooling, and data- or AI-assisted workflows.

You might thrive in this role if you:

- Have a strong track record of delivering high-impact technical programs across product, platform, API, infrastructure, machine learning, or safety domains.
- Bring strong technical judgment across distributed systems, cloud deployments, public or internal APIs, developer platforms, production machine learning, or scalable product architecture.
- Can engage credibly with engineers on system design, implementation tradeoffs, reliability, deployment constraints, and operational risks.
- Have delivered platforms or developer-facing capabilities and understand how technical decisions affect customer experience, developer experience, and product usefulness.
- Understand how safety, integrity, or abuse-prevention systems work, including evaluations, model guardrails, classifiers, monitoring, enforcement, investigations, and incident response.
- Bring strong program management discipline and can coordinate multiple workstreams, resolve complex dependencies, and turn ambiguity into accountable execution.
- Demonstrate product judgment and can balance user and customer needs with model usefulness, safety risk, technical complexity, and business priorities.
- Communicate clearly and empathetically with engineering teams, executives, policy and legal partners, and external stakeholders.
- Are comfortable owning high-stakes programs that require executive presence, cross-organizational influence, and sound decisions under uncertainty.
- Have relevant experience with sensitive deployments, major cloud providers, or serious-harm domains such as violent misuse, child safety, cybersecurity, or other emerging threats.
- Are hands-on, curious, and motivated to help ensure increasingly capable AI systems are deployed responsibly.

## 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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