Model Policy

About the Role

Day-to-day, you will work closely with research, engineering, product, preparedness, and operations teams to build policies that are technically grounded, measurable, and responsive to real-world risk. Your expertise in model behavior and policy development will be crucial in defining how Openai's models should behave in high-risk or high-ambiguity contexts, such as agentic systems, multimodal systems, user safety, privacy, and other emerging risk domains.

What You Will Do

• Design and maintain model policies across safety-relevant domains, including dual-use, agentic, and emerging frontier-risk areas.
• Translate risk and harm models into clear behavioral specifications, evaluation criteria, grading guidance, and system-level safeguards.
• Define practical boundaries between beneficial uses of AI and assistance that could materially enable harm, exploitation, misuse, or unsafe outcomes.
• Build policy artifacts that support model training, evaluation, and deployment.
• Partner with safety researchers, engineers, product teams, and other stakeholders to operationalize policy into scalable model behavior and measurable safeguards.
• Use red-teaming results, deployment data, model failures, over-refusals, under-refusals, and ambiguous edge cases to improve policy and evaluation quality over time.
• Identify emerging capability areas where frontier AI systems could create new safety challenges or lower barriers to harm.
• Study real-world deployments to identify where model behavior succeeds, fails, or drifts from the intended safety posture.
• Combine longer-horizon safety research with hands-on launch and deployment work.
• Contribute to system cards, safety reports, policy documentation, launch reviews, and external communications on Openai's approach to model safety and risk mitigation.
• Design and run human data campaigns, including gold set construction, labeling guidance, calibration, adjudication, and eval coverage analysis, to ensure policies can be reliably measured and improved.

What We Are Looking For

• Strong judgment about how advanced AI systems may affect real-world risk, especially in ambiguous, fast-moving, or high-impact areas.
• Experience building or applying policies, taxonomies, harm models, threat models, or risk frameworks for complex technical, social, or adversarial systems.
• Ability to move across domains without needing to be the deepest subject-matter expert in every area, while knowing when to seek expert input.
• Ability to turn fuzzy questions into structured policy frameworks, evaluation criteria, operational guidance, and enforceable model behavior.
• Comfort using empirical evidence, including evaluations, red-teaming results, deployment observations, and model failure modes, to inform policy decisions.
• Strong understanding of systems thinking across policy, data, graders, classifiers, training, deployment safeguards, measurement, monitoring, and evaluation.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work with cross-functional teams.

Nice to Have

• Experience working with AI systems, particularly in the context of safety and risk mitigation.
• Familiarity with machine learning, deep learning, or natural language processing.
• Knowledge of regulatory frameworks and industry standards for AI safety.
• Experience with human data campaigns and eval coverage analysis.

Benefits and Perks

• Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI safety projects with a renowned team.
• Competitive compensation and benefits package.
• Flexible working hours and remote work options.
• Access to cutting-edge technologies and tools.
• Professional development opportunities, including training and conference attendance.
• Collaborative and dynamic work environment.

• When applying, be sure to highlight your experience with policy development, risk assessment, and technical expertise in your resume and cover letter.
• Showcase your ability to think critically and move across unfamiliar topics by providing specific examples from your previous work experience.
• Prepare to discuss your understanding of AI safety and its importance in the industry, as well as your knowledge of regulatory frameworks and industry standards.
• Be ready to provide examples of how you have applied empirical evidence to inform policy decisions in the past.
• Research Openai's approach to AI safety and be prepared to discuss how you can contribute to the company's mission.
• Consider creating a portfolio that demonstrates your skills and experience in policy development and AI safety, and be prepared to discuss it during the interview process.