Lead Research Engineer / Scientist, Chemical & Biological Risk

OpenAI • San Francisco, CA

103d

About The Position

As the lead researcher for chemical & biological risks, you will design, implement, and oversee an end-to-end mitigation stack to prevent severe chemical and biological misuse across OpenAI’s products. This role demands technical depth, decisive leadership, and cross-company influence to ensure safeguards are enforceable, scalable, and effective. You’ll set the technical strategy, drive execution, and ensure our products cannot be misused for severe harm.

Requirements

• Have a passion for AI safety and are motivated to make cutting-edge AI models safer for real-world use.
• Bring demonstrated experience in deep learning and transformer models.
• Are proficient with frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Possess a strong foundation in data structures, algorithms, and software engineering principles.
• Are familiar with methods for training and fine-tuning large language models, including distillation, supervised fine-tuning, and policy optimization.
• Excel at working collaboratively with cross-functional teams across research, policy, product, and engineering.
• Show decisive leadership in high-stakes, ambiguous environments.
• Have significant experience designing and deploying technical safeguards at scale.

Nice To Haves

• Bring background knowledge in biosecurity, computational biology, or adjacent technical fields.

Responsibilities

• Lead the full-stack mitigation strategy and implement solutions for biological and chemical misuse—from prevention to enforcement.
• Ensure safeguards integrate seamlessly across OpenAI products and scale with usage.
• Make decisive calls on technical trade-offs within the bio risk domain.
• Partner with risk modeling leadership to align mitigation design with anticipated risks and coverage.
• Drive rigorous safeguard testing by stress-testing the mitigation stack against evolving threats and product surfaces.

What This Job Offers

• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees