Head of Preparedness

OpenAI • San Francisco, CA

4d

About The Position

As the Head of Preparedness, you will lead the technical strategy and execution of OpenAI’s Preparedness framework , our framework explaining OpenAI’s 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.

Requirements

• 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 realities—shipping high-quality work on tight timelines in fast-moving contexts.

Nice To Haves

• Bring experience in areas such as threat modeling, cybersecurity, biosecurity, misalignment/deception, or other frontier-risk domains.

Responsibilities

• Own OpenAI’s 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees