Device Safety & Risk Operations Specialist, User Safety & Risk Operations

About the Team

At OpenAI, our 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 areas of work. 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 seeking a Device Safety & Risk Operations Specialist to build the safety operating model for a new category of consumer hardware. This is a senior individual-contributor role for someone who can turn emerging product risks and incomplete requirements into practical workflows, controls, launch plans, and durable systems.

You will define how product-safety incidents, critical escalations, regulated cases, and privacy-sensitive issues should be identified, investigated, escalated, resolved, and learned from. You will also establish operational requirements for case management, data access, decision logging, quality assurance, monitoring, and cross-functional response. You will stand up priority workflows through launch and early operations, then help transition them into durable homes across USRO and partner teams.

The right person combines deep operational judgment with strong technical and hardware product fluency. They can move from executive-level risk framing to detailed workflow design, tabletop exercises, launch readiness, frontline guidance, and post-launch improvement.

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:

• Build the end-to-end safety and risk operating model for new consumer hardware, from early requirements through launch and early-life operations.

• Define incident taxonomies, severity levels, decision rights, escalation criteria, response pathways, and closure standards.

• Develop operational playbooks for product-safety incidents, critical escalations, safety advisories, corrective actions, and other high-risk events.

• Design workflows for regulated and privacy-sensitive cases, including restricted handling, evidence requirements, auditability, and partner escalation.

• Translate safety and operational needs into requirements for tooling, case management, data access, monitoring, logging, and automation.

• Establish clear ownership boundaries across Product, Engineering, Legal, Privacy, Product Policy, Support, Product Quality, and other operational partners.

• Build launch-readiness plans, tabletop exercises, training, quality controls, reporting, and post-launch monitoring.

• Use operational data, customer signals, product telemetry, and case outcomes to identify patterns and improve upstream products and systems.

• Determine where AI and automation can improve triage, evidence assembly, consistency, and response while preserving appropriate human judgment.

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

You Might Thrive in This Role If You:

• Have 8+ years of relevant experience in device safety, product safety, consumer hardware operations, technical program management, or a related field.

• Have built a complex safety or risk program from an ambiguous starting point through launch and scaled operation.

• Understand the realities of handling high-severity incidents, regulated workflows, sensitive customer information, and time-critical escalations.

• Can translate product, engineering, legal, privacy, and policy cons...