Safety Response Operations Lead

ABOUT THE TEAM At OpenAI, our Trust, Safety & Risk Operations teams safeguard our products, users, and the company from abuse, fraud, scams, regulatory non-compliance, and other emerging risks. We operate at the intersection of operations, compliance, user trust, and safety working closely with Legal, Policy, Engineering, Product, Go-To-Market, and external partners to ensure our platforms are safe, compliant, and trusted by a diverse, global user base. The Global Safety Response Operations team provides 24/7 coverage for user safety, risk, and regulatory escalations across OpenAI’s products, handling the highest-priority cases that require human judgment and rapid response. The team operates as the core escalation and delivery arm of OpenAI’s safety operations, ensuring that our products remain safe and aligned with policy while enabling timely, empathetic, and consistent user support. ABOUT THE ROLE The Global Safety Response Operations Lead is a hands-on team lead who both manages a regional Safety Response team and personally handles high-risk safety cases. This role combines frontline safety work with people leadership, operational ownership, and cross-functional coordination. You will lead a team of Safety Response Analysts who handle OpenAI’s most sensitive and high-impact cases, while also personally contributing to casework for complex, high-risk, or high-visibility issues. You will own the execution of high severity escalations in your region and ensure proper execution and communication to cross functional stakeholders You will be accountable for ensuring your region consistently meets utilization, quality, and SLA targets while serving as the operational interface with Product, Policy, Legal, Investigations, and regional stakeholders. This is a 24/7 global operation that requires flexibility to support rotating shifts, including nights, weekends, and holidays, as part of a leadership on-call model. In This Role, You Will: - Lead and coach a regional team of Safety Response Analysts, ensuring high performance, engagement, and consistent decision quality. - Own regional operational outcomes, including utilization, SLA adherence, backlog health, and quality benchmarks. - Handle and oversee the most complex and high-risk cases, serving as the first line of escalation and incident lead for your region. - Contribute directly to frontline work (20–30%), including investigations, enforcement decisions, and regulatory or legal escalations. - Partner cross-functionally with Product, Policy, Legal, Investigations, and local market teams to execute safety outcomes and manage risk. - Drive operational excellence and continuous improvement, improving workflows, tools, automation, and escalation paths. - Identify emerging risks and trends, translating frontline insights into actionable recommendations for policy, product, or enforcement. You Might Thrive in This Role If You: - You have 8+ years of experience in Trust & Safety, Risk Operations, Investigations, Fraud, Annotation, or platform integrity. - You have 4+ years of direct people leadership or senior-level operational ownership, including coaching experienced operators, setting clear direction and supporting independent judgement. - You have applied AI tools and automation to improve operational workflows, with sound judgment about where human review remains essential. - You are deeply familiar with trust and safety operations, across multiple risk areas including content moderation, user safety, fraud, or developer risk frameworks, including the legal, policy, and technical considerations that shape enforcement. - You are a strong decision-maker in ambiguous, high-risk environments, able to balance speed, accuracy, and defensibility when handling sensitive or high-impact cases. - You communicate complex safety and risk decisions clearly and credibly, whether writing escalation narratives, briefing Legal or Policy, or aligning Product and leadership during incidents. - You can translate between frontline operations and strategic stakeholders, turning messy real-world cases into structured insights and turning policy or product direction into clear, executable guidance for your team. - You are skilled at influencing without authority, building trust with Product, Policy, Legal, Investigations, and regional partners to drive alignment and resolve ambiguity. - You use data, tooling, and automation to improve quality, efficiency, and scale to not just measure performance, but to make better decisions. - You are comfortable leading in a 24/7, high-pressure operational environment, providing calm, credible leadership during incidents, spikes, and regulatory or reputational events. 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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. 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