Device Safety & Risk Operations Specialist, User Safety & Risk Operations

Device Safety & Risk Operations Specialist, User Safety & Risk Operations

Trust & Safety – San Francisco

At OpenAI, our User Safety & Risk Operations (USRO) team helps protect our products and users from abuse, fraud, safety risks, and other forms of misuse. We operate at the front line of real‑world safety and risk management, translating user and operational signals into timely decisions, effective interventions, and improvements to our systems.

We are seeking a Device Safety & Risk Operations Specialist to build the safety operating model for a new category of consumer hardware. This senior individual‑contributor role requires turning emerging product risks and incomplete requirements into practical workflows, controls, launch plans, and durable systems.

In this role you will:

• Build the end‑to‑end safety and risk operating model for new consumer hardware, from early requirements through launch and early‑life operations.
• Define incident taxonomies, severity levels, decision rights, escalation criteria, response pathways, and closure standards.
• Develop operational playbooks for product‑safety incidents, critical escalations, safety advisories, corrective actions, and other high‑risk events.
• Design workflows for regulated and privacy‑sensitive cases, including restricted handling, evidence requirements, auditability, and partner escalation.
• Translate safety and operational needs into requirements for tooling, case management, data access, monitoring, logging, and automation.
• Establish clear ownership boundaries across Product, Engineering, Legal, Privacy, Product Policy, Support, Product Quality, and other operational partners.
• Build launch‑readiness plans, tabletop exercises, training, quality controls, reporting, and post‑launch monitoring.
• Use operational data, customer signals, product telemetry, and case outcomes to identify patterns and improve upstream products and systems.
• Determine where AI and automation can improve triage, evidence assembly, consistency, and response while preserving appropriate human judgment.
• Stand up priority workflows, operate them through launch and early‑life stabilization, and transition them into durable homes across USRO and partner teams.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 8+ years of relevant experience in device safety, product safety, consumer hardware operations, technical program management, or a related field.
• Have built a complex safety or risk program from an ambiguous starting point through launch and scaled operation.
• Understand the realities of handling high‑severity incidents, regulated workflows, sensitive customer information, and time‑critical escalations.
• Can translate product, engineering, legal, privacy, and policy constraints into workflows that operational teams can execute.
• Are technically fluent and can reason through data flows, telemetry, access controls, audit logs, case systems, automation, and failure modes.
• Use data to assess workflow health, identify emerging patterns, evaluate quality, and make risk‑based decisions.
• Can establish clear accountability across teams with overlapping responsibilities and different risk tolerances.
• Know how to balance launch speed with safety controls, monitoring, rollback criteria, and longer‑term system development.
• Communicate clearly with operational, technical, legal, and executive audiences when evidence is incomplete or trade‑offs are difficult.
• Are highly practical and willing to build the workflow, not only define the strategy.

Nice to have:

• Experience supporting consumer hardware, connected devices, or other products used in shared environments.
• Experience with product‑safety investigations, recalls, field failures, safety advisories, or hazardous‑product handling.
• Expe…