Analytics & Automation Lead, User Safety & Risk Operations

OpenAI•San Francisco, CA

4d•$302,000 - $335,000•Hybrid

About The Position

OpenAI's User Safety & Risk Operations (USRO) team is responsible for protecting products and users from abuse, fraud, safety risks, and other forms of misuse. The Analytics & Automation team within USRO focuses on enhancing operational effectiveness and scalability through the development of automation, analytics, reporting, monitoring, and quality systems. This includes improving work prioritization, review processes, measurement, and management across the organization. Their work encompasses workflow automation, operational health dashboards, queue and case analysis, quality measurement, feedback loops for classifiers and evaluations, alerting, reporting infrastructure, and decision-support tools. They collaborate with operational teams, Product, Engineering, Product Policy, Safety, and Support to identify opportunities and build practical systems. The Analytics & Automation Lead will manage and grow a senior technical operations team. This role involves translating operational challenges into measurable solutions, guiding technical and analytical independent contributors, prioritizing competing needs, and building scalable infrastructure. The lead will oversee work in areas such as workflow automation, operational health analytics, quality and evaluation systems, emerging-risk signal infrastructure, dashboards, reporting, and data feedback loops. A key aspect of the role is determining the appropriate balance between automation and human judgment for sensitive user-safety decisions. The ideal candidate is highly technical, comfortable with ambiguity, and proficient in using AI tools for real-world workflows. Success is measured by building systems that enhance the speed, reliability, measurability, and scalability of safety operations while preserving essential human judgment.

Requirements

12+ years of relevant experience across trust and safety, risk operations, data, analytics, automation, product operations, integrity, fraud, or similarly high-stakes operational environments.
4+ years of people management experience, including experience leading senior technical, analytical, or highly independent ICs.
Highly technical for an operations leader: comfortable with SQL, dashboards, data quality, classifier/eval concepts, automation design, and practical AI tooling.
Experience working with LLMs, agentic workflows, Codex-like tools, or internal AI platforms to automate operational work.
Have built systems that materially improved how operational work gets done, such as workflow automation, triage or routing systems, detection workflows, operational reporting, or classifier feedback loops.
Can distinguish high-value automation from risky automation, and know how to design human-in-the-loop review, monitoring, quality controls, and fallback mechanisms for sensitive workflows.
Strong operational judgment and understand the realities of running complex workflows at scale, including queues, reviewer processes, escalations, capacity constraints, and quality assurance.
Communicate clearly and concisely with technical, operational, and executive audiences, especially when tradeoffs are complex or evidence is incomplete.
Operate with high agency in ambiguous environments and can create structure, momentum, and measurable progress without overbuilding.
Mission-oriented, user-safety minded, and motivated by building systems that make frontier AI products safer and more trustworthy.

Nice To Haves

Experience in trust and safety, adversarial abuse, integrity, risk operations, or user safety at a scaled technology company.
Experience with classifier development, eval design, golden sets, labeling guidance, reviewer calibration, or model-quality feedback loops.
Experience leading analytics or automation work that supports multiple partner teams or business lines.
Experience building quality programs, audit processes, or decision records for sensitive or regulated workflows.
Familiarity with vendor operations, BPO training, QA, or scaled review programs.

Responsibilities

Lead and develop a senior team of technical and analytical ICs responsible for automation, analytics, reporting, and other systems.
Set the strategy and operating cadence for a horizontal team supporting safety and risk operations across multiple workflows and domains.
Prioritize a portfolio of high-impact opportunities, making clear tradeoffs based on user impact, risk reduction, operational need, technical feasibility, and scalability.
Build systems that improve operational health and visibility, including data infrastructure, dashboards, SLA and backlog monitoring, and quality measurement.
Design and implement workflow improvements such as automated triage, routing, prioritization, signal enrichment, case clustering, review assistance, and reporting automation.
Build and improve the systems and strategies for emerging risk identification, analysis, and signal sharing.
Identify where AI, LLMs, classifiers, or lightweight tooling can materially improve operational work, while designing appropriate evaluation, monitoring, human review, and fallback paths.
Establish measurement and quality frameworks for operational systems, including golden sets, sampling strategies, reviewer calibration, false-positive and false-negative monitoring, and system-health metrics.
Partner with operational leaders to understand their workflows, identify root causes and bottlenecks, and turn high-value needs into scalable systems rather than one-off analyses.
Collaborate with Product, Engineering, Policy, Legal, Safety, Support, and other partner teams to translate user and operational insights into better tools, processes, and outcomes.
Raise the bar for technical judgment, written communication, prioritization, and execution across a senior, independent team.