Head of Preparedness

About the team

The Safety Systems team ensures that OpenAIs most capable models can be responsibly developed and deployed. We build evaluations safeguards and safety frameworks that help our models behave as intended in real-world settings.

OpenAI has invested deeply in Preparedness across multiple generations of frontier models building core capability evaluations threat models and cross-functional mitigations. As we expect model capabilities to continue to increase and we continue implementing increasingly complex safeguards this work remains a major priority. The Head of Preparedness will expand strengthen and guide this program so our safety standards scale with the capabilities of the systems we develop.

About the role

As the Head of Preparedness you will lead the technical strategy and execution of OpenAIs Preparedness framework our framework explaining OpenAIs approach to tracking and preparing for frontier capabilities that create new risks of severe harm. You will be the directly responsible leader for building and coordinating capability evaluations threat models and mitigations that form a coherent rigorous and operationally scalable safety pipeline.

This role requires deep technical judgment clear communication and the ability to guide complex work across multiple risk domains. You will lead a small high-impact team to drive core Preparedness research while partnering broadly across Safety Systems and OpenAI for end-to-end adoption and execution of the framework.

In this role you will:

• Own OpenAIs preparedness strategy end-to-end by building capability evaluations establishing threat models and building and coordinating mitigations.

• Lead the development of frontier capability evaluations ensuring they are precise robust and scalable across rapid product cycles.

• Oversee mitigation design across major risk areas (e.g. cyber bio) ensuring safeguards are technically sound effective and aligned with underlying threat models.

• Guide interpretation of evaluation results and ensure they directly inform launch decisions policy choices and safety cases.

• Refine and evolve the preparedness framework as new risks capabilities or external expectations emerge.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with research engineering product teams policy monitoring and enforcement teams governance and external partners to integrate preparedness into real-world deployment.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Are motivated by ensuring frontier AI systems are safe reliable and responsibly deployed.

• Bring deep technical expertise in machine learning AI safety evaluations security or adjacent risk domains.

• Have experience designing or executing high-rigor evaluations for complex technical systems.

• Are comfortable making clear high-stakes technical judgments under uncertainty.

• Communicate crisply and can align diverse stakeholders around safety decisions.

• Have managed or led technical teams or driven cross-functional initiatives in research-intensive environments.

• Excel at balancing scientific depth with operational realitiesshipping high-quality work on tight timelines in fast-moving contexts.

• (Nice to have) Bring experience in areas such as threat modeling cybersecurity biosecurity misalignment/deception or other frontier-risk domains.

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 OpenAIs Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

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Required Experience:

Director