Technical Abuse Investigator

About the Team OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We believe achieving this goal requires real-world deployment and continuous iteration based on how our products are used—and misused—in practice. The Intelligence and Investigations team supports this mission by detecting, investigating, and disrupting the misuse of our products, particularly critical or novel harms. Our work enables partner teams to develop data-backed model policies and build scalable safety mitigations. By precisely understanding abuse, we help ensure OpenAI’s products can be used safely to build meaningful, rewarding applications. About the Role As a Technical Abuse Investigator on the Intelligence and Investigations team, you will be responsible for detecting, investigating, and disrupting malicious use of OpenAI’s platform. You will further scale parts of the investigative process to help our team disrupt harm at scale. This role combines traditional investigative judgment with strong technical fluency: much of the work involves navigating complex datasets to surface actionable abuse signals, not just reviewing individual reports. In addition to conducting investigations directly, this role is explicitly designed to act as a force multiplier for the broader investigations team. You will be scaling or automating highly manual, important and nuanced processes. You will design and implement lightweight technical solutions—such as notebook templates, data pipelines or internal utilities—that enable specialized investigators to identify, track, and action abuse at a greater scale than a single investigator can currently achieve. Success in this role is measured not only by investigations completed, but by how effectively your work enables you and your team members to operate more efficiently and consistently. You will work closely with engineering, legal, investigations, security, and policy partners to respond to time-sensitive escalations, investigate activity that falls outside existing safeguards, and translate investigative insights into scalable detection and enforcement strategies. This role includes participation in an on-call rotation to handle urgent escalations outside of normal work hours. Some investigations may involve sensitive content, including sexual, violent, or otherwise disturbing material. This role will work PST and is open to remote work within the United States, though we heavily prefer candidates based in San Francisco or New York. In this role, you will: - Detect, investigate and disrupt abuse and harm with policy, legal, global affairs, security, and engineering teams via complex datasets - Develop and iterate on abuse signals and investigative methods, scaling one-off insights to reduce manual effort and expand coverage.

• Build and maintain lightweight technical solutions (e.g., SQL/ Python data pipelines, investigation templates, dashboards, or internal utilities) for investigators focused on specific harm domains.
• Develop a deep understanding of OpenAI’s products, data systems, and enforcement mechanisms, and collaborate with engineering and data teams to improve investigative tooling, data quality, and workflows.
• Communicate investigation findings effectively to internal stakeholders through written briefs, data-backed recommendations, and escalation summaries - Rotate (in-frequently) into an incident response role that requires rapid threat triaging, investigation, mitigation, sound judgement and concise briefing to senior leadership - Be someone people enjoy working with - Proven ability to quickly learn new processes, systems and team dynamics while thriving in ambiguous, rapidly changing, and high-pressure environments. You might thrive in this role if you: - Have deep expertise in at least two of the following domains: agentic AI misuse; automation; encryption; terrorism; fraud; violence; child exploitation; data science; dashboarding; api abuse; product exploits, prompt injection; distillation; - Have 5+ years of experience investigating and mitigating abuse in a relevant domain - Have 4+ years of relevant technical projects - Strong presenter on safety work in public or policy settings - Have experience scaling or automating processes, especially with LLMs or ML techniques 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,

• To stand out as a Technical Abuse Investigator at OpenAI, develop a strong understanding of AI-powered products and their potential misuse, and be prepared to provide specific examples of how you've identified and mitigated similar issues in previous roles.
• Familiarize yourself with OpenAI's products and services, such as ChatGPT, and practice using them to demonstrate your ability to think critically about potential abuse vectors and develop effective investigation strategies.
• Highlight your proficiency in tools like SQL, Python, and data analysis software, and be prepared to walk the interviewer through your process for analyzing complex data sets to identify patterns and anomalies indicative of abuse.
• Create a portfolio or work samples that showcase your ability to communicate complex technical information to non-technical stakeholders, as this is a critical aspect of the Technical Abuse Investigator role at OpenAI.
• Be prepared to discuss your experience with continuous iteration and real-world deployment of AI products, and how you've used data-backed insights to inform product policy and safety mitigations in previous roles.
• When negotiating salary, research the market rate for technical investigators in the AI industry and be prepared to discuss your unique qualifications and experience, such as certifications in AI or cybersecurity, to make a strong case for your desired compensation package.