Data Scientist - User Risk Measurement

About the Team

The Intelligence & Investigations (I2) team detects and disrupts abuse and strategic risk so people can use our products safely. Within I2, Strategic Intelligence & Analysis is building a first-of-its-kind user-risk measurement function: policy-grounded baselines, confidence intervals, and attribution that reveal how real users engage with frontier AI—and how that changes when we ship mitigations. We sit between Safety Systems, Data Science, Integrity, and Product, turning heterogeneous safety signals into decision intelligence that appears in executive dashboards, launch/post-launch readouts, and weekly briefs.

About the Role

As a Data Scientist on this new function, you will help define how the industry measures complex, adaptive human–AI behavior at scale: You will establish trustworthy baselines for user-level risk, create attribution that links changes to real-world mitigations and events, and deliver concise narratives and metrics that guide safety strategy and product decisions. The work spans end-to-end ownership—from framing the questions to delivering decision-ready outputs with clear quality standards and governance—while collaborating closely across Safety Systems, Data Science, Product, and Policy

This role is based in San Francisco, CA (hybrid, 3 days/week): Relocation support is available

In this role, you will:

• Define the measurement framework for user-level risk across products and cohorts: scope the questions that matter and align on clear, policy-grounded definitions

• Establish baselines and statistical confidence for core metrics: prevalence, intensity, trends, and cohort dynamics

• Build decision-ready reporting surfaces: executive dashboards, weekly briefs, and launch readouts that translate insights into action

• Clean and organize ambiguous data from disparate sources, with an eye toward building automated pipelines and systems

• Create attribution and change-tracking: connect shifts in user behavior to mitigations, product changes, and external events

• Partner across Safety Systems, Data Science, Integrity, Product, and Policy: ensure one coherent analytics entry point and consistent standards

• Uphold quality, privacy, and governance: document methods, ensure auditability, and maintain durable measurement hygiene

• Monitor signals for emerging risks and anomalies: recommend priorities that reduce harmful usage and improve user safety

• Communicate clearly and concisely: deliver insights and trade-offs to executives and engineering teams in language that drives decisions

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 3–6+ years in data science, measurement/causal inference, or risk analytics in high-stakes domains:

• Are strong in sampling, inference, uncertainty quantification, probability theory, and rare-event estimation; comfortable with time-varying metrics:

• Write solid Python and SQL; are fluent with data warehouses and productionizing notebooks/pipelines:

• Communicate crisply, translating complex estimators into clear actions for executives and cross-functional partners:

• Nice to have: experience with Airflow DAGs or other ETL pipelines, Databricks, survival analysis, streaming/online detection, classifier evaluation/QA, privacy reviews/audit trails, or integrity/fraud/safety experience:

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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