Senior Program Manager, Consumer Device Safety Operations

About the Team

At OpenAI, the User Safety & Risk Operations (USRO) team helps protect our products and users from abuse, fraud, safety risks, and other forms of misuse. We operate at the front line of real-world safety and risk management, translating user and operational signals into timely decisions, effective interventions, and improvements to our systems.

This role sits on a team focused on building operational capacity for new, ambiguous, and fast-moving company priorities. The team defines what needs to be built, creates the operating model to support it, and works with partner teams to make the work scalable and durable over time.

About the Role

We are looking for a senior individual contributor to build the safety and risk operating model for a new category of consumer devices. The core need is a high-agency operator who can take a complex, unstructured problem, create the right structure, align technical and operational partners, and drive the work through launch and early operations. This is a foundational role: the systems you build will shape how OpenAI launches, monitors, and improves a new category of consumer devices safely at scale.

You will define how safety incidents, critical escalations, privacy-sensitive reports, fraud & ownership disputes, and other emerging device risks should be identified, investigated, escalated, resolved, and learned from. You will turn incomplete requirements into practical workflows, decision rights, launch plans, quality controls, measurement, and durable ownership.

The role centers on program building, operational judgment, and execution. Direct consumer-hardware experience is helpful but not required.

The strongest candidates learn unfamiliar technical domains quickly, ask sharp questions, and translate product, engineering, policy, legal, and user needs into operations that work in practice.

Location / work model: San Francisco, CA; hybrid, 3 days/week in-office.

Please note: This role may involve exposure to sensitive or concerning material. Strong discretion, judgment, and resilience are essential.

In This Role, You Will

• Lead strategic operational builds for device-safety priorities from problem statement to implemented operating model, including scope, owners, milestones, risks, success measures, and execution cadence.

• Define intake, severity criteria, decision rights, evidence requirements, escalation paths, response standards, closure criteria, and post-incident learning for high-risk cases.

• Translate product, engineering, legal, privacy, policy, support, and operational constraints into workflows, requirements, playbooks, and controls that teams can execute.

• Build launch-readiness plans, training, quality controls, reporting, monitoring, and early-life response mechanisms.

• Coordinate across Product, Hardware and Software Engineering, Product Quality, Legal, Privacy, Product Policy, Support, Logistics, vendors, and USRO to resolve dependencies and keep critical work moving.

• Use operational data, customer signals, product telemetry, case outcomes, and qualitative evidence to identify patterns, assess risk, and recommend action when the evidence is incomplete.

• Drive critical escalations and cross-functional decisions to closure with clear context, accountable owners, documented decisions, and durable follow-through.

• Create the mechanisms that make complex programs run well, including roadmaps, decision logs, risk registers, operating reviews, status updates, and executive communication.

• Identify where AI tools, automation, lightweight systems, or simpler workflows can improve speed, consistency, investigation, and quality while preserving appropriate human judgment.

• Stand up priority workflows, operate them through launch and stabilization, and transition mature capabilities into durable homes across USRO and partner teams.

You Might Thrive in This Role If You

• Have 8+ years of experience in program management, strategy and operations, product operations, technical program management, trust and safety, risk operations, incident operations, support operations, implementation, or a related field.

• Are technically and analytically fluent enough to reason about data flows, telemetry, logs, dashboards, access controls, case systems, automation, and failure modes, even if you are not writing production code.

• Have a track record of taking complex, ambiguous, and unstructured work from problem framing through launch and scaled operation.

• Can create clarity across many moving pieces without losing the few decisions, risks, and dependencies that matter most.

• Have sound judgment in high-severity or sensitive situations and can make practical, risk-based decisions with incomplete information.

• Build trust and drive alignment across teams without direct authority while keeping ownership, accountability, and escalation paths clear.

• Communicate clearly and directly with technical, operational, legal, policy, and executive audiences, especially when tradeoffs are sensitive or evidence is incomplete.

• Are highly practical and willing to build and run the first version of a workflow, learn from real cases, and improve the system over time.

• Operate calmly in a fast-moving environment, learn new domains quickly, and adjust priorities without losing rigor or follow-through.

Nice to Have

• Experience with consumer hardware, connected devices, IoT products, wearables, robotics, mobility, gaming, or another technically complex physical product.

• Experience with device launches, product quality, field incidents, repairs, warranty, returns, fraud, reverse logistics, or privacy-sensitive sensor and diagnostic data.

• A technical degree or equivalent experience partnering closely with hardware, software, data, or systems engineering teams.

• Experience with vendor operations, quality-assurance programs, incident response, workflow automation, or AI-assisted operations.

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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