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.

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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