Description
Compensation
$230K – $325K • Offers Equity
The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following 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 (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
- Mental health and wellness support
- Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
- Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
- 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, may also be provided.
About the Team
OpenAI’s Safety teams work to ensure our products are safe, trusted, and resilient as frontier AI systems scale globally. We tackle some of the company’s most important challenges across understanding and preventing misuse and misalignment, intercepting fraud and abuse, and protecting vulnerable users.
About the Role
As a Data Scientist, Safety, you will help solve complex and ambiguous problems where rigorous analysis directly informs critical decisions.
Depending on your background and team alignment, you may work on areas such as:
- Measure harmful or abusive behavior across OpenAI’s products
- Detect fraud, manipulation, coordinated misuse
- Evaluate and improve safety classifiers, rules systems, mitigation systems, and human review workflows
- Design experiments and causal analyses to understand product, policy, and mitigation impacts
- Build prevalence estimators, dashboards, monitoring systems, and executive decision frameworks
- Diagnose gaps in safety and integrity systems using behavioral and product data, and help quantify and navigate false positive / false negative tradeoffs
- Translate ambiguous safety risks into measurable problems and evidence-based recommendations
- Partner with Product, Engineering, Policy, Research, and Operations teams to improve safety outcomes
- Build zero-to-one analytical systems in rapidly evolving domains
Ideal Candidate
We’re looking for strong Data Scientists who thrive in ambiguous, high-leverage environments.
You may be a fit if you have:
- Strong statistical reasoning and analytical judgment
- Experience with experimentation, causal inference, or observational analysis
- Strong SQL and Python skills
- Experience working with messy, incomplete, or noisy datasets
- Ability to structure open-ended business or risk problems
- Excellent communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders
- High ownership and comfort operating independently
Why This Role
- Work on mission-critical problems with world-level impact
- Help shape how frontier AI systems are deployed safely
- Operate with unusual ownership and visibility
- Solve novel problems where there are no existing playbooks
- Join highly collaborative teams working across OpenAI
Location
San Francisco, New York, or London depending on team alignment and business need.
Compensation Range
$230K - $325K USD
Benefits
- Comprehensive health insurance
- Retirement savings plan
- Paid parental leave
- Flexible PTO
- Professional development opportunities
- Access to cutting-edge AI research and technologies
- Collaborative and dynamic work environment
- Opportunities for growth and advancement
Company Culture
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.