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Researcher, Agent Safety, Oversight and System Mitigations

OpenAI· Safety Systems
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San Francisco$380k - $500kFull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

Role focused on oversight and system-level mitigations to enable increasingly capable agents to operate safely and autonomously in real environments, with emphasis on building practical oversight systems and evaluating their effectiveness.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and evaluate system-level controls for agent actions like agent-based review. Plan how they fit in a broader system including sandboxing with process isolation and permission boundaries.
  • Work closely with a Codex harness engineering team to productionize the AI controls.
  • Red-team end-to-end agentic systems to measure whether controls prevent data exfiltration, unsafe tool use, and other harmful outcomes.
  • Improve the safety–productivity tradeoff by measuring and reducing missed harmful actions, unnecessary blocks, approval burden, and latency.

Qualifications

  • Strong systems or security instincts and can reason concretely about isolation boundaries, permissions, attack surfaces, and failure modes in complex systems.
  • Ability to turn ambiguous safety questions into concrete threat models, reproducible experiments, and practical mitigations, revising approach based on deployment evidence.
  • Ability to build robust experimental infrastructure and design evaluations that distinguish promising mitigations from brittle ones.
  • Deep interest in frontier AI alignment, safety and control.

Skills

Required:System-level controls for agent actionsSandboxing and permission boundariesRed-team / security testingThreat modeling and evaluative experiments

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 multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus 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 our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
  • Relocation support for eligible employees
  • Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends
Last updated Oct 8, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About OpenAI

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