Research Lead, Chemical & Biological Risk

About the team

The Safety Systems team is responsible for various safety work to ensure our best models can be safely deployed to the real world to benefit the society and is at the forefront of OpenAI's mission to build and deploy safe AGI, driving our commitment to AI safety and fostering a culture of trust and transparency.

We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely.

About the role

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.

In this role, you will:

• 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.

You might thrive in this role if you:

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

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 OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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