Research Program Manager, Frontier Assurance

About the Team

The Frontier Assurance team brings independent scrutiny into OpenAI’s safety decisions and helps the public understand and assess our safety work. We lead third-party assessments and safeguard testing for OpenAI’s flagship launches, pilot new assurance mechanisms such as embedded auditing, run our misalignment disclosure process, and incorporate independent expert input as evidence for critical safety decisions.

About the Role

As a Research Program Manager on the Frontier Assurance team, you will build programs that bring independent expertise into frontier AI safety decisions and make the evidence behind those decisions understandable to the public. You will lead external research partnerships and third-party assessments, coordinate public safety documentation, and develop new approaches to independent scrutiny and transparency. Working across research, engineering, product, policy, and communications, you will help ensure external findings inform concrete decisions and that our public explanations accurately reflect the evidence, limitations, and remaining uncertainty.

We’re looking for people with deep experience in research partnerships and program management with technical and research teams. This role combines partnership management, cross-functional coordination, an understanding of AI safety research, alignment, and evaluations, and strong communication skills. You will work with researchers and engineers within OpenAI and across the external community to initiate projects, set ambitious goals and milestones, and drive execution across multiple teams.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

- Design and run third-party assessment programs for frontier models and safeguards, including independent evaluations, adversarial testing, and new approaches such as embedded auditing. Work with researchers and external partners to define assessment questions, scope, access, timelines, and deliverables.

- Build and manage strategic research partnerships with third-party evaluators, academic labs, and other independent experts, prioritizing expertise, independence, and diversity of perspectives. Enable rigorous research, including work that challenges internal assumptions.

- Bring external findings to safety decision-makers and translate them into actionable recommendations for safeguards, deployment, product, and policy. Track follow-up actions and ensure partners understand how their input was considered.

- Partner with research, product, policy, and communications teams to explain the evidence behind OpenAI’s safety approach: what we tested, what we learned, how findings shaped safeguards and deployment decisions, and where limitations and uncertainty remain. Translate complex technical results into accurate, accessible communication for expert and public audiences.

- Lead public transparency programs, including system cards, summaries of third-party assessments, and updates on significant findings and follow-up actions. Develop approaches to sharing methods, results, and limitations while protecting privacy, security, and sensitive information.

- Create channels for researchers and civil society to ask questions, provide feedback, and inform future assessments and transparency efforts, including beyond individual launches.

- Own program goals, milestones, dependencies, and risks across assessment and transparency work, keeping internal and external stakeholders informed and resolving obstacles to execution.

You might thrive in this role if you: 

- Have an understanding of AI evaluations and measurement, and can engage with technical teams on evaluation design and results.

- Can interpret evaluation findings and communicate what they do and do not establish, including methodological limitations, uncertainty, and disagreement.

- Have experience building research partnerships and managing external stakeholders, especially academic researchers and independent experts.

- Can synthesize technical and social science research into clear executive summaries and accessible explanations for public audiences.

- Have experience delivering technical publications or public reports across multiple contributors, and exercising judgment about what to share, with whom, and when.

- Have worked cross-functionally across product, research, and engineering teams and can coordinate complex programs with policy and communications partners.

- Have an understanding of and interest in frontier AI safety and policy.

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 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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