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Data Scientist, Preparedness

OpenAI· Data Science
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San Francisco$345k - $385kFull-timePosted 7mo ago

About the role

Data Scientist to build and improve mitigations preventing extreme harms from AI systems within OpenAI's Preparedness team, focusing on mitigation intelligence, monitoring, and reducing over- and under-blocking.

Responsibilities

  • Evaluate and improve mitigation systems, including classifiers and detection pipelines across domains (e.g., biosecurity, cybersecurity, and emerging risk areas).
  • Diagnose false positives and false negatives with deep error analysis, root cause investigation, and clear recommendations for mitigation adjustments.
  • Build monitoring and measurement frameworks to track mitigation effectiveness over time and across user segments and use cases.
  • Identify trends in over-blocking vs. under-blocking, quantify customer impact, and propose prioritized interventions.
  • Develop insights from customer feedback, complaints, and usage patterns to detect shifts in adversarial behavior and system failure modes.
  • Expand risk monitoring into new areas, including cybersecurity threats and model loss-of-control or sabotage scenarios, in partnership with domain experts.
  • Communicate results to technical and executive stakeholders with crisp narratives, decision-ready metrics, and clear tradeoffs.

Qualifications

  • Significant experience in data science or applied analytics in high-stakes domains (e.g., security, trust & safety, abuse prevention, fraud, platform integrity, or reliability).
  • Strong foundations in experimentation, causal thinking, and/or observational inference; ability to design robust measurement under imperfect data.
  • Fluency in SQL and Python (or equivalent) for analysis, modeling, and building monitoring workflows.
  • Experience building metrics, dashboards, and operational monitoring that meaningfully changes outcomes (not just reporting).
  • Track record of driving cross-functional impact with engineering, product, and research partners.
  • Cybersecurity data science experience (strong preference), including exposure to threat modeling, adversarial dynamics, abuse patterns, or security telemetry.
  • Experience with classifier evaluation, calibration, thresholding, and error analysis at scale. Familiarity with detection systems in adversarial settings (e.g., evasion, distribution shift, feedback loops).
  • Genuine interest in AI safety, alignment, and catastrophic risk prevention.

Skills

Required:SQLPythonExperimentation & Causal InferenceMetrics & MonitoringCross-functional InfluenceCommunication to Executives
Nice to have:Threat Modeling / Cybersecurity Data Science

Benefits

  • Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
  • Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
  • 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
  • Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
  • Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
  • 13+ paid company holidays, and additional paid office closures; paid sick or safe time
  • Mental health and wellness support
  • Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
  • Annual learning and development stipend
  • Daily meals in offices, and meal delivery credits
  • Relocation support for eligible employees
  • Additional taxable fringe benefits (e.g., charitable donation matching, wellness stipends)
Last updated Sep 3, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About OpenAI

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